


we decided not to kill the wolves (we wanted to be wolves)

by crossingwinter



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Beauty and the Beast inspired, Enemies to Lovers, F/M, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-13
Updated: 2019-01-05
Packaged: 2019-09-17 17:37:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 32,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16978965
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crossingwinter/pseuds/crossingwinter
Summary: A pack of wolves lives in the woods to the north of Raddus and as winter looms, they have their eyes set on Leia Organa’s stronghold.  Rey may be new to Raddus, but she’s not about to do nothing while it may be in danger.  And besides, Poe must be exaggerating about wolves the size of bears.  She’s not afraid of monsters.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [PalenDrome (nerdherderette)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdherderette/gifts).



> _Prompt_ : 1. Creature Fic (shapeshifter/werewolf/vampire/selkie, etc): There's a legend that something lurks on the outskirts of the city/village. Something dangerous. (Bonus for Creature Hunter!Rey)
> 
> Title from “The Wolves” by Frank Stanford
> 
> I had a tremendous amount of fun with this fic and hope very much you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! It…expanded beyond control and I hope that that is a good thing rather than an exercise in “why is this fic so long?”
> 
> Per the guidelines of the exchange, I have posted the first chapter and the remaining ones will be posted before author reveals on January 8th.

They threw the skin on the ground. “Wolves. The pack gets closer and closer.”

Rey glanced around the square. Every face that she saw was grim. Winter grim. Cold grim. A different sort of grim than she’d grown up with, but no less powerful.

“How close?” Leia Organa asked, leaning heavily on a cane. She was a short woman, and age had weakened her bones, but it had done nothing to her spirit—no more than winter had.

“This one we found by the river.”

“Before or after Maz’s?”

“Long before.”

“Damn.”

Leia looked at Poe. “We can try to drive them back before the first snows,” Poe told her.

“Can it be done before the moon?”

“We’ll do our best or die trying,” he said, resting his hand on his sword.

“I’d prefer no deaths,” Leia said. “We’ve lost enough. See it done.”

#

Rey had arrived in Raddus with Finn four months before, in high summer when the grasses were green and flowers bloomed and fruit fell from the trees, overripe and juicy. Rey had never seen so much green in her whole life, and she was determined that so long as she lived, she would never go back to a place where green this deep and this gentle could not flourish.

“There is nothing waiting for you there,” the little old witch Maz Kanata had told her when she had come to Raddus to read palms. “No one is coming back for you. But there is someone who still can.”

“Who?” Rey had asked at once.

“It doesn’t say,” Maz had shrugged, tapping Rey’s palm with a gnarled dark finger. Rey hadn’t been entirely sure she believed the little old woman. Maz Kanata wore bottlecap glasses and they magnified her already large dark eyes to make her look almost like an owl. Rey thought she saw knowledge in those huge eyes, but she couldn’t be sure if it was knowledge of Rey’s future or just the wisdom that came with age.

Maz’s had pressed a something into her palm and closed her hand around it. “When the time comes, you’ll know what to do.”

When Rey opened her palm, she saw a ring—heavy and braided and bronze. More importantly it was too big for her fingers—even her thumbs. So she put it on a chord that she wore around her neck, letting the ring hang close to her heart.

#

Poe found her and Finn drinking in the hall, his face determined, the shadow of a beard growing on his face. Without waiting to be asked to join, he sat down in the seat next to Finn and reached for the pitcher of beer that they’d been splitting between them. He flagged down a boy to fetch him a mug and a moment later he was drinking deeply.

“Are you sure it’s wise to go?” Finn asked him.

“What choice do we have? If the pack comes close by winter, it will mean death for all of us,” Poe snapped. “She doesn’t like hearing it, but that makes it no less true.” He glanced up at the dais. Leia Organa was sitting there with Amilyn Holdo and Lando Calrissian. All three of them had their heads bent together, speaking quietly.

“Wolves can’t be more dangerous than lions,” Rey said. She had fought desert lions before—great hairless cats with eyes that were too wide and teeth that were too sharp. She’d won, too. Wolves did not frighten her.

“Our wolves are,” Poe said. “These aren’t the wolves of the lake country,” he added. “They’re twice the size of a man—more bear than wolves. And they’re vicious things. Monstrous.”

Rey frowned. “That wolfskin—”

“Was the skin of a normal wolf. They run with the pack too—lesser creatures that are drawn to it for power or safety. If it were normal wolves, I wouldn’t be worried. But a pack this size, getting nearer—that one was likely a scout, seeing how things are south of the river and planning to report back to the others.”

“How many are going?” Finn asked.

“As many as will come with me,” Poe replied, swirling his beer around in his mug and sipping it. “Though I doubt that it would be as many as if it were Luke Skywalker going or—” He looked around. “Or if Ben hadn’t left.”

Finn and Rey both grimaced.

Ever since they had arrived in Raddus, they’d only heard Ben Solo’s name in whispers—something that had frustrated both to no end. From what they had learned, Lady Organa’s only son had abandoned his duty, given up his claim to his mother’s seat, decrying her nobility, and had left the city several years before. Though he hadn’t been a popular lordling—Rey had never been sure if this was an instance of the whisperers looking back with distaste, rather than having lived with their distaste before he’d left—Rey did not doubt that Leia Organa’s son would have roused much more of a hunting party than Poe could if he were here and wished to ride out in his mother’s name.

“Do I have your bow?” Poe was looking at Finn intently, his eyes glinting in the firelight.

“Always,” Finn said. He was the best shot of anyone in Raddus, and his longbow of smooth polished mahogany was his most treasured possession.

“And my spear,” Rey added, and Poe nodded to her.

He raised his mug and said, “Leia Organa, and all who dwell under her protection.”

“Lady Organa,” Finn and Rey echoed and all three drank.

#

They set out at dawn the next day—a group of fifteen. Most of them were men and women that Rey had spoken to before—guards who served under Poe, even some who she had sparred with in the courtyard. It felt strange to be riding out with so many, but then again, Rey was used to doing this sort of thing on her own.

She was used to doing everything on her own.

That’s how things had been in Jakku—Rey, by herself, always, until she had found Finn in the sands and her life had changed forever. If she needed protection, she was the one to give it to herself; if there were monsters to do battle with, she rode out alone.

Rey had hunted desert lions, and sandsnakes that were four times her size and had venom so powerful it could kill a horse in three minutes. Rey had fought raiders and frightened off chimeras. Hunting wolves didn’t frighten her.

“Are you scared?” Finn asked her quietly when Raddus melted into the trees behind a bend in the road.

Monsters didn’t frighten Rey. “No,” she said. “We’ll kill them and have done with it.”

Finn nodded.

“Are you afraid?” she asked him, realizing he might have been asking in hopes of commiseration.

“Yes, but only because I’m not stupid.”

“Hey!” she laughed and elbowed him. He grinned at her.

“This isn’t a laughing matter,” Poe called from the head of the party. “These creatures are not to be underestimated. Packs like this have flattened more powerful cities than Raddus before.” Rey rolled her eyes, but before she could respond, Poe said, “And one of these monsters killed Han Solo.”

#

Finn polished his bow by the cookfire that night. They’d made good progress, but the woods to the north stretched on for miles and miles, and the roads stopped being roads so much as space cleared through the underbrush before too long. It slowed their pace tremendously.

“How far north is the pack?” Rey asked as they ate.

“North,” shrugged Paige. Of those they were traveling with, Rey knew Paige best apart from Poe because Finn was in love with her sister Rose and they were going to wed at winter’s end. “We won’t go all the way, though. Just enough to kill the ones we find. She would have sent a bigger party if she wanted outright war.”

“Why would she want outright war with wolves?” Rey asked, frowning. “They’re wolves, not men.”

“Wolves aren’t like other creatures,” was all Paige said. “And these wolves are more sinister than that. They…they want what men want, or so it’s been said.” She looked about, then lowered her voice, “When she was young, wolves nearly took over the whole of the north. Would have ruled over men as if they were overlords. But she helped stop them—her and her brother and her husband.” She leaned back.

“Why did you lower your voice?” Rey asked her. She knew that Lady Organa had more than merited her title, knew that her brother was a great hero as well, though Rey had seen no signs of him since arriving in Raddus.

“Because—” but Paige stopped talking because Oddy and Kaydel came and sat with them and the conversation lay unfinished.

#

It took longer than they wanted to to find a trace of the wolves, and it was Rey who found it first—a footprint in the mud, buried by some leaves.

“Well done,” Poe said, clapping her on the shoulder. “Onward,” he said to everyone else.

“Not as hard as finding a footprint in sand on a windy day,” she said to Finn.

Finn gave her a warm look. “Yeah, but you seemed to know it was there. Accept the praise, will you?”

“I’ll try,” she said softly.

They pressed on. Days passed without any more sign of the wolves than a footprint or a bit of fur that got caught in the underbrush. Rey tried not to notice that she seemed to be better at finding the traces of wolf than her friends. She did truly believe that they had just never had to trace sand lions through the dunes before, and this was just _easier_. That didn’t stop them from calling her wolfspeaker though.

“It’s a joke,” Finn said. “A sign they respect you.”

“For something I’m not even doing,” Rey muttered, running her fingers over the bronze ring that Maz Kanata had given her. It was comforting to feel it heavy between her fingers like that. “It’s like they think I’m a witch. I’m not.”

Finn shrugged. “Let them have it. It doesn’t do you any harm.”

He was right, of course. It didn’t do any harm, for all it made her uncomfortable. It felt like praise she didn’t deserve for a thing she’d barely done.

Poe didn’t like it either. “There isn’t _speaking_ to these creatures,” he snapped when he heard Snap calling her wolfspeaker. “If there were, Lord Solo would still be alive. He tried to _speak_ with the beast, and it killed him. So I’ll have none of that.” And they stopped.

Rey was relieved, for the most part, though the question remained for her: why would Han Solo have tried to speak with a beast?

#

On, and on, and on, and on they went. Days bled into one another. But they didn’t see any wolves—not the ones that were the size of the dead one that had been thrown on the ground at Leia Organa’s feet, nor the larger ones that Rey was increasingly convinced weren’t real. The way that Poe and the others talked about them, they sounded like the figments of a child’s scary story. In Jakku, telling tall tales like this had been a way to pass the time, and none of the creatures in those tales had ever been anywhere near as close to the monsters that she’d heard about. The wolves would be the same. No wolf could be larger than a bear.

The moon waxed overhead, brightening their nights a little more each night.

“She wanted us to turn back before the full moon,” Paige told Poe in the darkness. “We should turn back.”

An owl hooted.

“They’re not dead yet,” Poe replied firmly. “And we haven’t seen any sign of them more than tracks. We need something to show for all this. We have to—”

But whatever it was that they had to do died on Poe’s lips as, somewhere in the wood ahead, a wolf howled.

“Well it looks like we found them,” Finn said, knocking an arrow to his bow and half-drawing the string, his eyes on the trees.

“No,” Rey replied, and it was as though she were hearing her own voice from very far away. “No, they found us.”

She had the right of it. Wolves—a good fifty of them—made their way out of the trees. But not a one of them was the size of a bear the way that Poe had told her back in Leia’s hall. They looked like they could be easily stuck—large and angry dogs. Rey had fought worse and lived. But in the light of the moon, their teeth glinted.

“Careful,” Poe commanded.

But he was the first to charge into the fray, swinging his sword at a wolf that leapt at him.

Rey didn’t have time to take in what others were doing around her. She lunged forward with her spear, catching a wolf on the sharp steel end of it. It let out a high-pitched bark of pain and she turned the spear’s head and tugged it loose. The creature died. It seemed so much smaller in death.

But before she even could process the odd sadness she felt for it, another was snarling at her, leaping, the full heavy hot weight of it colliding with her chest and knocking her back into the dirt. Rey caught its throat in her hand and pushed away its snarling head. She tried to roll it off her, to try and get it on its back so she could choke it properly, but the wolf was made of muscle and—strong as Rey was—it was a match for her.

It was not a match for Finn, though, and the arrow that he shot into the back of its head before turning to fire at another wolf. Rey shoved the wolf’s corpse off her and grabbed her spear and sent it into the belly of another wolf, and another, and another.

The wolves seemed _endless_. When Rey killed one, it was as though three more popped up in its stead. She’d fought lions in the sands, and great angry poisonous snakes. She did not fear beasts, and did not fear fighting but this was something else. The wolves seemed coordinated, as though someone had carefully ordered each and every one of their movements and Rey began to understand what it was that had made Poe seem so adamant that these wolves weren’t like other creatures. Lionesses hunted together, but wolves fought as one. _And if a larger beast commands them._

She understood now. Understood and filled herself with rage because it was always easier to fight when rage sent blood pumping hot through your body.

It didn’t take much. She heard shouts and cries and grunts. “Paige!” she heard Poe bellow, and Rey screamed in horror at the blood that was spurting out of the other woman’s neck

There could be no openings. They had to die. It was either the wolves or them, for Rey was certain they would give the party no mercy at all. _Beasts,_ she fumed, feeling stronger in her fury. _Monsters_.

That was when she saw it—saw it and her blood went cold and every living creature in the clearing froze.

The wolves backed away slowly, some of them crouching down low as though bowing to a king.

And she could not blame them—for this creature was a king among wolves.

He was larger than a bear, just as Poe had promised, and made of muscle and fur that was black as night. Blacker, really—the full moon was bright tonight. His face was long, his eyes glinted gold in the light of the moon and when he growled, fear filled the clearing. Those who had ridden forth from Raddus hunched down over their weapons, eying the creature warily, waiting to see what would happen next. Rey couldn’t even blame them for their nervousness, for her own heart was pounding so very loudly in her chest as she stared at the great black wolf. He looked at their party, taking into account the fallen, the wounded, and his eyes landed on Finn.

Finn did not hesitate. He raised his bow and fired it.

His arrow missed, but he did not wait to see if it had made its mark to knock another one and aim and fire.

“Finn!” Rey heard herself shriek in horror as the great wolf got closer and closer, growling with rage opening his jaws and snapping shut with a horrible crunch around Finn’s bow.

Finn howled in pain. His hand had gotten caught in the wolf’s maw and he was being dragged as the wolf turned its head from side to side.

She saw Finn’s blood dripping from his snout and it was as though the spell broke. Rey was running, her spear in hand and she slashed it, hard, against the wolf’s face. It let out a bark of pain and rounded on her and she slashed at him again, pushing him back, back, back into his back.

He snarled and rounded at her, trying to snap his teeth around her staff, but she moved too quickly for him and every time his jaw closed it was around empty air.

“Kill him, Rey!” she heard Poe shout, and she lunged forward and for a moment, she thought she had gotten too close to him, her face right in front of his. She saw something more than rage there.

A long tongue swiped out of his mouth, licking the blood from his teeth and Rey let out an angry yell because that—that was _Finn’s_ blood, and she slashed at him wildly with her spear.

It cut him clear across the eye and now it was his own blood on his face as he recoiled away from her in surprise. She bore down on him and in that moment it was she who had become the predator, fury burning in her gut as she glared at him.

Something in his eyes changed.

She had never known an animal to have such expressive eyes, but had also never known an animal quite like this. And a moment later, he turned tail and fled.

“Oh no you don’t!” she yelled and took off after him.

“Rey!” she heard people shouting behind her but this was what they had come out for, wasn’t it? To hunt this pack of wolves, to kill as many of them as they could manage? Didn’t they wish to kill the king and watch his kingdom crumble?

She ran as fast as she could, her spear in her hand. A smaller wolf—how small they all seemed now that she had seen the king—tried to catch her, to bite her but she jammed its face with the butt of her spear and it fell back. She heard the sound of steel in her wake and knew that Poe and the others were on her tail. She hoped that someone was taking care of Finn. Rage fueled her at the thought. Her legs flew faster.

How long and far she ran, she did not know. Her heart was pounding in her chest, her breath was cold in her throat and the farther she went, the quieter the woods seemed to grow.

The pack hadn’t followed them. Poe and the rest had fallen too far behind to know where she was. She didn’t even know where she was.

Foreboding filled her.

“Face me, you coward,” she screamed at the wolf and to her complete and utter shock, he did. He rounded on her, rearing back and swiping at her with a huge paw. Rey spun away, but not before a single claw sliced through the sleeve on her upper arm. She snarled at him and he—wolves could not laugh. But the noise he made sounded like it could have been a laugh.

 _A trap_ , she wondered suddenly, horribly. She remembered what she’d heard about Han Solo. Was this the beast that had slain him?

But she was not fool enough to think that she had time to consider that and she lunged for him with her spear again. He sidestepped it and she lunged again. This time, she grazed his side—enough that some of his blood spattered the snow. But it seemed a light wound in comparison to the one he had given Finn, because he reared up and he was enough to blot out the stars overhead in the clearing.

While he stood there, reared on his hind legs, Rey lunged forward, aiming for his heart, but this time he swatted her spear away, sending it flying from her hand and far, far into the trees. Then he swiped at her, almost lazily, and Rey stumbled backwards, avoiding those dagger-like claws by inches. Her heart was drumming in her chest. She had to get her spear back. She was dead without her spear.

But she knew better than to think she could outrun him. He was far larger than she, his stride far longer. She danced backwards, away from his swipes, trying to turn her backsteps in the direction of where her spear had gone. If she could just angle it properly, she could continue to dodge towards the spear, couldn’t she?

And it was in considering that as an option that his paw connected with her midriff and sent her flying. With a crack, she hit a tree and slid down to the forest floor again, stars of pain exploding behind her eyes, her lungs not wanting to breathe out of shock. _Move,_ she willed her mind as she heard the wolf moving towards her. The sounds were muffled in her ears. She could hear him less clearly than her own pulsing heart, her shallow breaths echoing loudly in her head.

How she managed it, she would never really know but somehow she was on her feet again, staggering towards her spear. Was the sky lighter now, or was that just her eyes reacting to her having been thrown against the tree? Behind her, she heard the wolf howl, but it did not matter—it did not matter because her hand had closed around the mahogany and she whirled around.

The wolf was not behind her. His howl had not been right at her back, but she hadn’t dared trust her ringing ears and her over-wide eyes. She ran back to the clearing and saw—

The wolf was shrinking. Hair was receding into his body and he howled as though he were in agony. His giant paws were shrinking and they were going to cover his face which—though still long—no longer was a snout so much as chin and jaw and nose. He was moaning, crying out, practically sobbing. He shrunk, and shrunk, and shrunk. After a point, he fell to his knees, still clutching his face. His black hair receded to reveal pale skin and muscle and despite his nakedness, Rey couldn’t help but stare. His abdominal muscles rippled and the muscles of his thighs bulged as though every muscle were tensing over the act of condensing back down into the form of a man.   Blood seeped down his side from where she’d cut him.

Rey stared at him, transfixed. The monster was a man after all.

He stopped his moaning, his shouting and he was running his hands over his face as though wiping tears from his eyes, blood smearing his face.

And Rey couldn’t help it—she had just been fighting him, had been intent on killing him, but suddenly everything was different, he was not a beast at all, so she asked, “Are you all right?”

He froze and slowly his hands dropped down to his sides. He did not bother trying to cover the long penis that hung between his legs but Rey couldn’t focus on that now because he had locked eyes with her. His eyes were darker than the wolf’s. The wolf’s eyes had been a bright, golden brown. His were so dark they were nearly black. He stared at her, and stared at her, and there was something familiar to him, but Rey couldn’t place how.

Then he reached out a hand and every muscle in Rey’s body froze around her. He got to his feet and walked towards her, and he was so tall—taller than any man Rey had ever met. He loomed over her in the burgeoning dawn, coming to stand before her until there was no way to avoid looking at his chest—shining with sweat—or the scabbed-over cut across his face that Rey had slashed there for hurting Finn.

He stared into her eyes for a long while. Then his hand twitched.


	2. Chapter 2

Rey came to as the sun was setting. Or perhaps rising.

No, not rising.

It had been rising in that clearing while the man—the wolf—the man who had been a wolf was becoming a man again.

Rey groaned, and began to take stock of her surroundings.

Her hands and wrists were bound and she was tied to a tree—firmly it seemed, for when she tried to adjust her wrists, to test the bounds, they didn’t give an inch.

She smelled smoke and cooking meat and heard a telltale crackle of a nearby fire. Her captor was cooking. “Who are you?” she said loudly. She could not see him, but she knew he was there.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“I asked you first,” she replied, putting as much defiance in her voice as she dared.

“And I have you tied to a tree.”

“Of course you do. You’re a monster.” She bit the words out. She wondered if they would wound him. Her spear hadn’t managed, so why would her words?

“Yes. I am.” He sounded firmly as though he agreed with her, as though it caused him pride to say—and perhaps, just perhaps, a little bit of pain.

His confirmation hung in the air. Then, he spoke again. “Organa—did she send you and your men?”

“They weren’t my men. I wasn’t the commander.”

“You and your party, then. Did she send you?”

“Yes,” she replied. “The pack is too close to Raddus.” It was only after she had said the words that it occurred to her that she should have said nothing at all. He may not be a wolf, but that did not mean that he did not run with the pack. Indeed, he had seemed to command him. He was far more dangerous than a wolf, in being also a man.

“So she would throw away the lives of her men, fighting a battle she can’t win,” he drawled.

“We can win.”

“Did you?” he asked, a little sardonic.

Rey didn’t know, though. She had pursued him into the woods, leaving his pack with the remainder of Poe’s men.

“You tell me,” she said after a moment, knowing it was too late to sound like she spoke with confidence. “Did we?”

He did not reply, and given the way the wolf had seemed to laugh at her, she wouldn’t have been shocked if he were mocking her out of her line of sight right now.

To her surprise, he rounded the tree. He was clothed now, in dark wool and leather. She wondered if he had stored it in the woods for him to find when he changed from wolf to man again. He held a cooked rabbit in his hands, which he had cut in half. He set one half down on a plate at his side and began to tear off piece of meat. To her complete surprise, he extended his hands as if to feed her.

“I’d sooner die,” she said. His face twitched.

“Suit yourself,” he replied, bringing the meat to his own lips and eating.

“Why haven’t you killed me yet?” she demanded. “You killed Han Solo, didn’t you? What do you gain by keeping me alive?”

“Yes,” he said and there was a bite to his voice now that there hadn’t been before. “I killed Han Solo.” Black rage swirled in his dark eyes. “And my pack will destroy Raddus and the remainder of Organa’s influence.”

“Because wolves need a town to themselves,” Rey snapped, rolling her eyes. “They need houses—did the rest of your pack turn back into men, too?” She knew the answer before he spoke.

“No,” he said. “Just me. And—” but he stopped himself.

“There are more of you?” she pressed. “More wolfmen?”

He did not reply, and in his silence, she knew she had the truth of it. _That must be what Leia is afraid of,_ she thought. _Not the smaller wolves, the normal ones. The wolfmen._

And then, with horror, _How many of them are there? And is this truly their king, or is there another, greater wolf?_

“So you are taking me to your master?” she asked, hoping her voice didn’t betray just how much she was guessing. “To see what he would do with me?”

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“What’s yours?” she retorted.

“I asked you first this time and I have you tied to a tree.” His voice was calm, as though he were trying to speak reason to a petulant child, and Rey realized in that moment exactly one thing. _He wants his way, but he doesn’t want to hurt me._

Why?

“And I’d sooner die than answer,” she replied. He let out a frustrated growl. It was a man’s growl, and far less impressive than the growl of the wolf the night before. _He is just a man._ And Rey has survived men before. Especially if this one was unwilling to hurt her, if he wanted to _feed_ her—she was sure she could endure him.

_I am the captive, but I haven’t fully lost the upper hand._

“Take me to your master, then,” she said. “If that’s what you’ve set out to do.”

He stared at her. “I will,” he said. “You should eat,” he added. “The journey is a long one.”

“Cut my hands loose and I shall,” she said.

“I’m not that much a fool.”

“Do you plan to carry me the whole way, then? Or do you plan to cut my feet loose from this tree?”

He glared at her and it was all she could do not to smile. He hadn’t gotten that far.

“Organa must like you,” he said at last. “All her spitfire and defiance.” Somehow, it managed to sound like both an insult and praise. “It will be your downfall.”

“Because your master won’t tolerate it?”

“He’ll toy with you until he’s crushed you,” he said. “Best unlearn it on the road or you will break.”

“The Jakku desert didn’t break me,” Rey replied. “Desert lions and starvation didn’t break me. Your master stands no chance.”

#

She was sure it was because she had goaded him that she ended thrown over his shoulder as he made his way through the woods. Whoever this man was, he was strong. He carried a pack hung over his shoulder, a sword at his belt, and Rey over the other shoulder and it didn’t seem to break him at all.

It was humiliating, really, to be carried like this, ass in the air as it was. His grip over her legs was too firm for her to knee him properly and her hands were tied behind her back. And, worst of all, her chin was resting on the small of his back, stretching her head out such that the only thing that she could see as he walked was the curve of his ass.

She wished it were less muscular. It was annoyingly well shaped.

“This can’t be comfortable for you,” she said after ten minutes. He did not reply.

“You are going to get tired.” This time, he snorted.

She fiddled with the ropes binding her hands but to no avail. He was good at knots, this wolfman. “How did you become a wolf?” she asked at last. “Are you a witch like Maz Kanata? Is that how you got me to freeze?”

He was silent, and she assumed he was just ignoring her as he had before. So it surprised her when he answered her question. “I am more than Maz Kanata.”

“Because you can turn into a wolf, or because you could make me freeze?”

“Everything,” he said, helpfully.

Rey rolled her eyes.

“I was made a wolf,” he said at last, as though sensing her frustration. “My master made me a wolf.”

“How?”

“You haven’t heard the legends?” he asked and there was a sardonic tone to his voice.

“I’m not from this part of the world,” Rey grumbled. “I’d never seen a wolf before last night.”

“Poor you,” he said and she couldn’t tell if he meant it or not

“Yes, it was unfortunate luck,” she said. “What are the legends?”

“My master bit me,” he said.

“He bit you?”

“The bite of a werewolf turns someone else into a wolf.”

“Did you want to be bitten?” she asked. He did not respond to that. “You didn’t, did you. He became your master against your will. Why do you serve him? Did you want to kill Han—?” But she didn’t finish the question because she was suddenly unconscious again.

#

She came to when he set her down on the ground by a tree. He almost immediately turned his back on her. “You can’t just knock me out because I annoy you,” she called after him as he crossed to the other side of the clearing.

He did not reply. He unhitched his pants and a moment later, she heard him sigh as he took a piss against a tree. She did her best not to conjure the memory of his penis from the other night in the clearing when he’d been transforming back from wolf to man.

Worse: the sight of him pissing made her realize how uncomfortably full her own bladder was.

“Are you going to untie me?” she asked him.

“We’ve been through this,” he says, fastening his trousers and rounding back on her.

“So you just want me to piss myself all over you while you carry me over your shoulder?”

He froze and stared at her, clearly thinking quickly.

“Do you need to piss now?” he asked her.

“I’d like that, yes.” How hadn’t she needed to when they’d been in the clearing before? It felt now as if her bladder was about to explode. _When_ had she last pissed and how _hadn’t_ she pissed all over him before now?

He crossed the clearing and unbound her legs. Then he jerked her to her feet and she made to turn around so he could get her hands but no—his hands were—“What are you _doing?_ ” she yelped at him as he tugged her trousers down her legs without looking at her.

He was refusing to say a word, refusing to look at her at all, and if she’d thought it had been humiliating to be thrown over his shoulder, ass in the air, it was _nothing_ to squatting down in the dirt and pissing while he purposefully stared at the tree overhead, as though trying to be a gentleman even in this situation.

She found she hated him more for that than if he’d leered at her.

“I’m done,” she told him when she’d finished pissing and just _praying_ she didn’t need to shit any time soon. That would be even worse than this. He helped her up and fumbled at pulling her trousers back up her legs without looking at her.

“This is ridiculous,” she told him as he tried to tie them in place.

“Do you want to piss yourself or not?”

“As a captor, you leave a lot to be desired. Have you ever held someone captive before?”

“I didn’t exactly plan this,” he snapped at her.

“That much I can tell,” Rey retorted in kind. “Why are you even—” but the words died on her lips. His eyes were boring into her and suddenly she was back in Jakku again, clutching her arms around her knees as she fell asleep, holding herself because no one else would; she was dreaming of an island, water water everywhere, the opposite of Jakku in every way; she was sobbing crying begging them to return; and she knew he was in her head just as surely as she knew he had frozen her in that clearing before knocking her out.

“Get out of my head,” she bit out at him. There were tears in her eyes. She didn’t want to think about that, didn’t want to think about any of it. She wanted to scream, to hit him, to push him out of her head for making her remember. And that cold fury fueled her as she glared up at him, burning colder and colder until suddenly it wasn’t her memories she was drowning in at all.

 _Ben, be careful_ she heard someone calling as the boy tried to levitate a glass pitcher.

 _He’s just…not what I thought he’d be,_ she heard a voice that was oddly familiar saying. _I didn’t think it would be like this._

_He’s no Vader._

_Don’t you want to be Vader?_

_Vader was strong._

And he took a step back from her, breathing hard, his dark eyes flickering between each of hers in panicked surprise. Whatever he’d been expecting as he’d pressed into her memories, it was certainly not that she would press back.

“You’re afraid,” she whispered to him and his face twitched in anger. “That you’ll never be as strong as Vader.” But she didn’t understand the words coming out of her mouth. “Who was Vader?”

She knew before he did it that he was going to knock her out again in panic and this time, she had no idea how, but this time she was ready for him. She remembered that cold fury, the way that the strength had felt as it had flowed through her and she kept herself standing, despite the weight of the—of whatever it was he was trying to do.

And then the weight was gone. He was done with whatever it was he had thought to try and he was shoving her back down into the dirt. Whether he intended it or not, she landed several inches to the side of where she’d pissed, a fact of which she was relieved.

“You’re a witch,” he said to her, crouching down, and this time, when she felt the weight, it wasn’t probing or overpowering. It was as though he were tracing the lines of her face.

“I’m not,” she said, thinking of little old Maz Kanata and her bottlecap glasses and her cryptic words and the bronze ring she had pressed into Rey’s palm.

“You are,” he said. “Untrained, but powerful.” And then a look of determination crossed his face.

She knew he was going to try before he did and this time, she was ready. Ready because this time, her legs weren’t bound.

He made to pick her up and throw her back over his shoulder, but she kneed him, hard, in the groin. He let out an angry whine and she took off, running as fast as she could going in she didn’t even know what direction, her hands scrabbling at her bonds. She knew it was foolish. She knew he’d catch her. But surely if she _was_ a witch, that made this all that much worse. _Untrained, but powerful._ Well, no time like the present to see what that meant.

He tried freezing her in her place again and her muscles revolted against her mind as she tried to lift the weight of however he did this off her. But she had apparently reached the end of whatever witchcraft she possessed.

“You have two options.” He sounded very angry. “I unbind your arms and legs while I’m awake and you come quietly and behave yourself. Or I tie you up, and knock you out, and drag you kicking and screaming to my master.”

She realized he’d released her face from his witchcraft when her lips pulled back in a snarl. She spat in the dirt.

“Have it your way,” he said, and a moment later, she was in the dirt again, and he was tying her legs together as she let fly a slew of curses at him, insulting his mother, his master, his honor—anything she could think of. It made no matter.

He grabbed his pack, and threw her over his shoulder and—for good measure she was sure—knocked her out again.

#

She woke to the howling of a wolf somewhere in the woods and flailed—or rather tried to. It was hard to flail properly with ropes cutting into your wrists and legs.

“You’re safe,” she heard him say in a low voice.

“Yes, so very safe,” she snapped at him angrily, rolling over so that she could see him, sitting by the fire. “Safe in captivity. The best sort of safety.”

He did not respond.

He had wrapped her in a blanket, and folded something soft under her head. It was a rough woven blanket, but a blanket all the same. An oddly kind gesture. She’d never admit to him how glad she was of it. She could get very cold at night.

“That one’s alone,” he said. “Trying to find pack. He got separated.”

He said it matter-of-factly.

“You can understand them, even when you’re not a wolf?” she asked him.

“Yes,” he replied. “Though I could have gotten that without knowing.”

“How?”

“Common sense,” he said dryly. “I have some, despite what you might believe.”

“What I might—”

“Just because I didn’t plan this doesn’t mean I don’t have common sense,” he said and he sounded affronted, as though her words had stung him. That her words had affected him at all surprised her. “There’s only one wolf howling. If it were part of a pack, there’d be more of them howling.”

The wolf howled again and this time, there were two answering calls from further off. He nodded, as though the responding wolves had proved his point.

“Do you howl to your pack, even when you’re a man?” she asked. “Do you care about them?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Wolves are better than people.”

“That’s not true,” Rey said, thinking of Finn. She hoped he was all right, wherever he was. She hoped that this man—

“What’s your name?” she asked him.

“I still have you tied up, so you should tell me yours first.”

“You’re impossible.”

“You’re not the first person to have told me that.”

“I’m Rey,” she said, deciding this was all so very stupid and not worth it.

“Kylo,” he replied.

There was something different about him at night. The flames of the fire in front of him sent long shadows across his face. His eyes looked like black pools in the middle of his face. But his expressions seemed sadder.

“Are you far from your pack?” she asked him quietly, and she could see from the way he lifted his chin slightly that he understood that she meant family, not pack.

“I left my pack,” he said at last. “And found a new one.”

“A master can’t be pack, though,” Rey said. Not if pack meant family.

“He is my pack,” he said and his gaze was steady, determined. “It’s better that way.”

Rey frowned.   Something about that didn’t make sense. “Did you choose it? Choose to be bitten?” _Choose to leave your family?_

His gaze was steady as he looked at her over the flames. _Yes, I am,_ he’d said when she’d called him a monster. “Yes,” he said at last. “Yes. I chose to be all I am.”

#

“Who was Vader?” she asked again the next day as she stared at his ass. She would have the memory of the shape of it burned into her brain until the day she died, of that she was sure.

“My grandfather,” he told her.

“And you wanted to be like him?”

“My parents were afraid that I would be like him.”

“Why?”

“They feared him. What he became.”

“What did he become?”

“Powerful.”

“And your parents didn’t want you to become powerful?”

“Not the way Vader was.”

“Could he...was he a witch too?”

Kylo sputtered. “A witch?”

“If I can throw you off, it’s because I’m a witch. Doesn’t that make you a witch too?”

“I suppose it does,” he said. “Warlock. That’s what I was told.”

“What’s the difference between a witch and a warlock?”

“Gender.”

“That’s stupid,” Rey said.

“We have gendered words for lords and ladies,” he said. “Kings and queens. Why not witches and warlocks?”

Rey paused, thrown by his argument. Why was Lady Organa not Lord Organa, for she did all that a Lord did? Because she was a woman, and had once had children, a son she had lost and a husband as well? Rey had never questioned it, but the more she thought about it, the more she got confused.

“Archers can be both men and women,” she said instead. “And knights, and—”

“Witches and warlocks.” He shrugged, or tried to, his shoulder jutting up into her gut.

“Don’t do that.”

“This?” he shrugged again.

“Yes. Don’t.”

He didn’t.

“Were you a warlock before you were a wolf?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Who trained you?”

“My uncle.” He said the words as though it pained him.

“What happened to him?” she asked.

“What do you mean?” He seemed to be shaking underneath her now.

“You stopped training with him? Or did something happen to him.”

“He tried to kill me,” Kylo spat out. “He feared me, feared that I _would_ be Vader, and that I wouldn’t be, and he tried to kill me.”

The words hung in the air for a long time. Rey couldn’t call it silence, what stretched between them—not when fallen leaves and twigs crackled under his footsteps. In the void that the words had left, Rey wondered many things, but mostly she wondered at why she felt a sudden surge of pity for him.

“How could he fear that you could be your grandfather and that you wouldn’t be?” she asked him quietly, determined to keep the thickness in her throat out of her voice.

“My uncle,” Kylo seethed, “is a hypocrite of the highest order, too wrapped up in his own legacy and heroism to care about—” he cut himself off and did not continue.

“To care about,” Rey prodded. But it didn’t work and Rey knew what it was.

_To care about me._

“He turned you into a monster,” she whispered after it was clear that he wasn’t going to continue.

Kylo didn’t say a thing.

“Do you like being a monster?” she asked him.

He did not respond.

#

She didn’t know what made him change his mind, but he unbound her legs at last. He tied a rope around her waist and secured it to his own so she could not run far. “As though I were a dog and not you,” she said. He glowered at her. “Oh, come on. That was funny.”

She didn’t know why she wanted to see him smile. She didn’t know why it was that she was trying to make him laugh.

But she did.

She had a feeling, down in her gut, that when he smiled, it would light up his whole face.

“How much longer is it?” she asked him.

“Now that I’m not carrying you, another day,” he said. “Or more, perhaps. We can go farther and faster as wolves than as people—although…”

His voice trailed away.

“What?” Rey prodded, and was surprised when he replied. She’d expected him to roll his eyes, or maintain a stubborn, stony silent.

“It’s not impossible to boost your own speed.”

“How?” Rey asked. It sounded useful.

“I’m not telling you while you keep trying to run away.”

“Suit yourself,” Rey muttered. She’d taught herself plenty in life. Knowing that she had magic and knowing she could use it to make herself go faster—that seemed like something she’d be able to manage. Just not quickly enough.

The woods stretched on and on. The trees had changed. No longer were they bare and skeletal, with leaves fallen in piles around them. Now they stood tall with long dark green needles. They smelled unlike anything Rey had ever smelled before. She felt like she could bury herself in that smell.

“There weren’t trees in Jakku,” she told him. Boredom, perhaps, was making her tell him things. Or frustration. Or simply wondering if he would care. Because he seemed to care. Why did he care? And more importantly, did she? “Sometimes there were cactuses, depending on where you went. But none of them were near the Niima Outpost. I heard you could cut a cactus open and drink water from it, but I never got the chance to try.”

“What’s a cactus?” Kylo asked her.

“What’s a—” she would have laughed, except he would have no reason to know. Somehow, she imagined wolves never went so far south. “A plant. Very thick skinned with spikes sticking out of them that prick you if you touch them.”

“That sounds unpleasant,” he replied.

“Nothing about the desert is pleasant,” Rey grumbled. She didn’t want to think about it. She’d take the overly cold north with the smell of pine over the constant, oppressive heat of Jakku. She’d take the green, and the gold and red of autumn.

“You were abandoned there,” he said at last. It wasn’t a question. He had seen it when he’d pushed into her mind.

“They—they were coming back for me,” she told him. But somehow the words didn’t work the way they always had when she’d been in Jakku. Something about the forest changed them.

“No they weren’t,” he said.

Rey looked away from him, out through the trees again.

Maz Kanata had said something like that too—that there was nothing for her back on Jakku, no one coming back for her. _But there is someone who still can,_ the little old woman had said with a meaningful look in those great, magnified eyes and she had pressed a ring into Rey’s palm.

Rey reached up and found that the chain still sat around her neck, and from the weight of it as she fiddled with it, the braided bronze ring still hung under her shirt. She did not know why, but that seemed important.

Every now and then, she heard the calling of a crow, or the crack of a branch in the wind. The wind, when it blew, seemed to moan, rather than whistle as it had in the desert. And she was alone, just like she always had been. No Finn at her side, no hope of being found. All she had was Kylo, and that was more comforting than it should have been, given that he was keeping her hostage. _He’s my captor_ , she berated herself. _I shouldn’t care what he thinks, or want him to smile._

“That’s why I picked the pack,” Kylo told her, and she looked at him. His face blazed with determination. “My family turned its back on me. The pack never will.”

“Is that why you’re taking me to your master? You want me to be part of your pack?”

“Yes,” he said at last and there it was, the truth of it all.

“ _Why?”_ she demanded. “Why would you _think_ I would turn my back on my friends, that I would pick you over them?”

He stood there, his hands balled into fists and his face—he looked oddly young. She was sure that he was older than she, but now he looked like a boy half his age, afraid of saying something that mattered to him, something that might get stomped upon, berated, laughed at.

“Because you asked me if I was all right,” he said quietly.

“What?” Rey asked.

“When I transformed. When I became a man again. You asked me if I was all right.”

She had.

She remembered that—in her surprise, in her confusion, in the evident pain he’d been in because he’d been transforming, she’d blurted it out.

“No one’s ever asked me if I’m all right,” he said quietly, looking at her almost shyly.

“And that’s enough for me to join your pack?” Rey’s voice came from very far away. She was too stunned by the—the sheer _leap_ of logic it would take for him to think that she’d go from wanting to kill him to wanting to run at his side, just like that.

_Has he never known any common kindness?_

The answer to that question made her so sad.

Not least because she herself had gone so long without it.

“If you want it. Or if my Snoke accepts it.”

“And what if he doesn’t?” she asked.

“Then I’d think of something.”

She took a deep breath and asked, “And what if I don’t?”

“I don’t know,” he said quietly, and he sounded defeated.

#

They reached the pack the next day.

And it was unlike anything Rey had seen before.

Hundreds and hundreds—perhaps even _thousands_ of wolves filled the trees around them—red and brown and black and grey, all with large hungry eyes. They were normal wolves, though. Not werewolves. They made their way down a pathway that had been cleared for foot traffic until they reached several large huts that had been built out of rough wood. They looked hastily made, as though they had decided that this would suffice for now, but they could be abandoned at any moment.

Kylo had not said a single word to her since his _I don’t know_ , and Rey wished he would. His silence made all of this that much more frightening. He did cut the ropes from her hands though. Clearly he didn’t think they needed to be bound anymore. Her shoulders were unbelievably stiff after days and days with her arms tied behind her back.

She saw people standing in the doorways of the houses, watching them. But as they approached the end of the row, three in particular stood out to Rey: a short man with red hair and a pointed face; a woman near as tall as Kylo with icy blond hair and icier eyes; but the man who drew her attention the fastest stood in front of the largest house. If the woman was near as tall as Kylo, this man was taller. He had no hair at all and eyes that burned a bright blue. His skull looked as though it had been bashed in, and his jaw was crooked as though it had once been broken.

“Ahh you have returned to me, my son of darkness,” the man said, and he held out his arms as though to embrace Kylo like a father. His voice was rich and low and Kylo stepped forward, but not into the man’s arms. Instead, he knelt before him, resting both of his hands on his knees and inclining his head to the side, bearing his neck to the man.

The man sniffed once, and rested a hand on Kylo’s neck, then traced his thumb over the scabbed cut Rey had given him on his face. “You have survived battle,” he said. “And brought back…” and the man’s blue eyes landed on Rey. His gaze made her skin crawl. “Ah. Explain.”

Kylo looked up at his master. “She would make a good wolf,” he said simply. “She is ferocious, clever, dauntless, indomitable. A good addition to the pack.”

The man’s eyes did not leave Rey, and Rey did not break beneath his gaze. She refused to. She refused to let him see her fear and uncertainty.

She did not like the way his hand was still resting on Kylo’s shoulder.

“Everything you have just described makes for a powerful enemy as well as a powerful ally,” the man said silkily. “What makes you think she would wish to join our little family?”

“She is powerful with magic. Untrained,” Kylo said. “If you give me time—” But he cut himself off when the man removed his hand from Kylo’s shoulder. He walked around Kylo, who did not turn his head to continue watching him. He approached Rey, moving almost a little jerkily.  

“You,” he said quietly as he approached Rey. “You have made my prince beg. I do not like that. He was born with power in his blood. And what are you? Desert rat. Scavenger.” A prickle crossed Rey’s skin, but she does not let it show. Her heart was hammering in her throat. “Well then? Will you join our little pack? Would you like to become a wolf?”

Rey took a deep breath and said the word as loudly, clearly, and forcefully as she could. “No.”

And the man laughed. “Kylo,” he chuckled, turning away from Rey and making his way back to stand before Kylo once again. “Your compassion makes you a fool. You have too much of your father’s heart.”

“I killed Han Solo,” Kylo said. “He is nothing to me.”

Rey’s heart went cold. _Too much of your father’s heart. Han Solo?_ And suddenly, she remembered his memories from when he’d pressed into hers and she’d pressed back, of being called Ben. It hurt more than she wanted it too. She’d had pity for him, the family who had turned on him. But if Han Solo was his father that meant that—

“And Leia Organa?” Kylo’s master asked. “Too much of her righteousness, I think. What did you do—keep the girl as a prize from your foray south? Pity her too much to kill her? You are _weak_.”

Kylo stood so quickly that Rey’s muscles tensed but a moment later something—magic?—had thrown him to the ground again.

“I trained you for an alpha,” Snoke was practically shouting at him. “And yet you would bring a defiant enemy here? Thinking that she could be pack? Do you think she wants you? Do you think she wants this?” And Snoke grabbed at Kylo’s throat so tightly that Rey couldn’t help crying out,

“No!”

Snoke froze and she saw Kylo stiffen too.

“No?” Snoke asked her. “But when you said _no_ just now, it was a different sort of _no_. Do you protest my treatment of those who serve me, girl?”

“Let him go,” Rey said. _Why_ was she demanding this? By his own lips, Kylo had murdered his own father. Surely she should be celebrating if he was being punished. He was a monster, by his own admission—now more than ever, surely.

Except he had reacted so strongly to her kindness, seemed to hunger for it like a starving man. And this was not kindness. Not even close. _His pack,_ she thought indignantly.

Snoke did not let go of Kylo’s throat. Instead, he started to laugh again. “Fascinating. Isn’t this _fascinating_.”

“Master,” the man with the pinched face and red hair cut in, “I—”

“Think the girl should be killed,” the master said. “Yes, I thought so too. I thought I’d make Kylo kill her. Cut out the weakness that he has shown as he has cut out his own weakness time and again. One more way he can become who he was meant to be.”

“You don’t think that’s wise?” the man asked.

Snoke’s hand was still around Kylo’s throat. The longer it stayed there, the more Rey felt herself trembling. _He killed his father for_ this _?_

“Perhaps,” he said. “Or, perhaps Kylo has seen in the girl what I have failed to.” And he released Kylo’s throat. Kylo sank to his knees again, shaking and breathing heavily. The master’s eyes were now trained on Kylo. _If only I had a weapon,_ Rey thought. With his attention so fixated, she could charge him, kill him. _And then get myself killed._ It would be worth it. If Kylo was a monster, this man was far, far worse.

“You have until the next moon to convince her. If you fail, I shall let Armitage kill her.” The master said. Then he turned and went into his house.

Armitage sneered at Kylo before turning and departing himself. The woman looked down her nose at him as well before going her own way.

Rey stood there, staring at Kylo’s back. It was stiff, and she knew that he knew that everyone was still watching him.

He got to his feet slowly and when he turned to her, his face was a stormcloud. He grabbed her arm and led her through the encampment until they reached a small house. He kicked open the door and shoved her inside. “Stay here,” he barked at her.   “If you try to leave, they’ll kill you.”

“Sounds like my life is forfeit anyway!” she called after him as he slammed the door shut behind him.


	3. Chapter 3

Rey sat in the house and waited, and the more she waited the more she remembered how much she hated waiting.

Oh—she was good at waiting. She cleared her mind, took deep breaths, did her best not to think about her current situation. She was highly practiced at that. She had been good at that for years.

 _She is powerful with magic. Untrained, but powerful._ She felt chilly, as she always did when waiting like this. She’d always thought that was because she slowing down her heart, as she sat there breathing. But no—no it was there. That cold determination she’d felt when she’d first thrown him off. _He overpowered me in the end, though. He still managed to knock me out again._ She focused on the cold, on the way it constricted around her chest, the way that it expanded what she could hear around her, the way that air passed in and out of her lungs.

The house was sparse. There was a bed in the corner, and a table with one chair at it. There was a fireplace and a chest with a heavy iron lock dangling from it. But apart from that, there was nothing.

It was strange, how empty it was. She had stuffed her shack in Jakku with as much as she could find. Kylo seemed to be a different sort of creature.

She sat there on the floor before the empty fireplace for a long while. It was long past sunset when he returned, carrying two rabbits and a few apples.

He did not say a word to her but set himself to lighting a fire in the fire place, then skinning and gutting the rabbits. He cut the meat into little pieces, then cut the apples into little pieces, then put all the meat and fruit into a heavy iron pot which he settled over the fire.

“How many more lies do you intend to tell me?” Rey asked him when she could no longer stand the silence.

“I never lied to you,” he said evenly.

“Half-truths and omissions are as good as lies,” she snapped. She could tell part of her anger came from hunger. The dinner he was cooking was starting to smell good. “Were you ever going to tell me you were Leia Organa’s son?” she demanded.

He did not respond and Rey let out a growl of frustration.

“And what would you have done in my situation?” he asked her.

“Not picked the man who would choke me in front of the—”

“My master was right to punish me,” he said angrily. “I behaved impulsively. It’s a bad habit of mine. I risked so much bringing you here.”

“Was it worth it?” she asked, and she meant the fact of his master’s fingers around his throat—she could still see the shadow of them on his skin, a fact that made her stomach twist angrily—but he didn’t seem to hear that.

“Yes,” he said, and his tone was deathly serious, his dark eyes so very deep. “It was worth it.”

Rey didn’t mean to say it aloud, but the words spilled out of her lips anyway. “Of course a moment of kindness would matter that much to you—after the way he treats you.”

He recoiled as though she’d slapped him.

“You want to know who treated me poorly?” he snarled at her. “My _mother_ , who never once treated me as anything more than an heir, never once cared about me as a _son_ and a person with a head and a heart. My _uncle_ who tried to murder me, and my—” he stopped short. “My father.”

“Your father. He tried to talk to you—to get you to come home.”

“Yes he did,” Kylo bit out and there was anger in his eyes. “But you wouldn’t understand that, would you? Longing for parents the way you did. You wouldn’t understand that the home he promised was a figment of his imagination, no more a place for a creature like me than it ever had been for me when I was a boy.”

It was as though he’d punched her, as though he’d grabbed her by the shoulders and shaken her, and once again, Rey focused on her fury rather than her pain as she snarled back at him, “How would you know? Surely it would be better than _Snoke_.”

“Snoke—he is harsh but he is honest. He never has pretended to be anything more than what he is—and he is so much more than any of them ever managed.”

Rey reached her hand out and ran her fingers over the bruising on his neck. He flinched under her touch. “He’s more a monster than you,” she whispered. “You may have killed your father, but—” _But there’s kindness in you._ How odd, that she could see it so _clearly_ now after only a few moments with Snoke. “His hurting you isn’t love. It isn’t duty or respect. Is it truly better than what there was before?”

“You tell me,” he said quietly. “You never had anyone growing up. Isn’t something better than nothing?”

“Not if it’s this,” she told him. “I’d flee any pack that did this to me.” Suddenly her head hurt as though it had been smashed against a wall. She inhaled sharply, wondering if Kylo had done something to her, but no. No, he hadn’t. No, this was a memory of something. She remembered crying. She remembered saying she’ll stop, she’d be good, just please. _Sometimes nothing is better than something._ She swallowed. She didn’t like admitting it to herself. Even if it had, finally, gotten her away from Jakku. _They wanted me dead, leaving me like that._

Her fingers were still on his neck, and they were shaking and suddenly, his hands were covering hers, closing around hers. “Rey,” he whispered to her and his voice was low, and soft. But he didn’t say anything else. Just her name. Just her name, and his hands on hers, and his eyes on hers and something registered that had not before.

 _He took that beating for me,_ she thought confused. _He took it because he wanted me._

_Because I was kind to him._

_And now he is being kind to me._

It was confusing. Her head was still hurting and her heart was aching, and oh, how confused she was because he had murdered his father, turned his back on his mother.

But for some reason he had chosen her, and no one but Finn had ever done that before.

It made it hard to breathe, and yet, also easier.

They sat like that for a long time, their hands resting on his neck, waiting for the other to move, to say something, but neither of them feeling the immediate need.

#

“It’s your house, and I’m your prisoner,” Rey snapped at him.

“Well, I’m not taking the bed,” he replied stubbornly.

“Then we can both sleep on the floor because I am not sleeping in your bed.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

Which was how they ended up on the floor by the fire, piled under blankets, refusing to look at one another.

She could not stomach this gesture of kindness—not when she knew what lay under it. _You have until the next moon to convince her. If you fail, I shall let Armitage kill her._

“You sleeping on the floor isn’t going to convince me that I should become a wolf,” she told him because she knew he was still awake.

“I’m not trying to convince you to become a wolf.”

“Don’t lie,” she snapped at him.

“At least not with this,” he amended.

“Then what—”

“Because my mother, for all I can’t stand to think of her, taught me better than to let my guest sleep on the floor.”

“I’m not your guest, I’m your captive,” Rey said, rolling her eyes.

“You’re my guest,” he said firmly.

“So I could get up and leave, and you’d just let me? Such fine hospitality I can expect from you.”

“You’re impossible.”

“So let me go.”

“I’ve noticed you stopped trying to run,” he pointed out and he sounded bemused.

“Because I know I can’t escape,” she replied.

“So you just give up then?” Mocking. Deriding. It rankled. “In that case, why not just give in and become a wolf.”

“I suppose if I said yes to that, it would prove me unworthy in some way and then you wouldn’t want me.”

“You woefully underestimate how much I want you.”

Rey’s mouth went dry and she was glad that she had a good excuse not to look at him, though she found it wholly unhelpful in the memory of his muscles rippling in the moonlight as he’d approached her, the way his chest had positively glowed.

“And this is because I was nice to you when you are unused to receiving kindness?” she asked him, hating that her throat sounded dry to her own ears. “Or is it because of these latent magical powers I didn’t know I had?”

“You made me care about your wellbeing and your happiness with one breath,” he said firmly. “And I won’t turn my back on that. I won’t let what will befall the rest in Raddus befall you.”

Rey’s heart skipped a beat as she thought of Finn. “What will befall the rest of Raddus?”

“Why do you think my mother sent your men out—”

“They weren’t my—”

“Fine. _Her_ men out, then—to hunt wolves? She knows there’s danger coming in the winter.”

“That doesn’t answer my question and you—”

“Hux will kill you before Snoke has given him license if he knows that you know,” Kylo said darkly. “Do you value your own life?”

“Not more than my friends,” she replied. “Finn—the one _you maimed_.”

“He was firing arrows at me,” Kylo replied, indignant. “You would have preferred me to do nothing?”

“Yes,” Rey replied. She heard him let out an angry huff.

“It is not a crime to attack my enemy,” he told her.

“But you can’t expect _your enemy_ to sympathize with it,” she replied. “I care about Finn far more than I care about you.”

Silence was the only response to her words. Well, it was the truth. Just because he wanted her to care about him didn’t mean that she did, and if he couldn’t handle it that was his problem, not hers.

He must have thought she was asleep because after a while, she heard him sit up and go to the door of the cabin. He slipped out into the night and closed the door behind him. She heard the sound of something crashing echoing through the trees and wondered if she imagined it, or if she heard him howling like a wolf into the night.

#

When Rey woke, the cabin was empty. She dressed, found a covered bucket that she relieved herself in, and then began poking around the cabinets. She didn’t really expect there to be food—not when he had just been out in the woods for days on end. But she was nothing if not a starving scavenger and she had to at least check.

There was nothing, though, and she sighed. Then she went to the door and poked her head outside.

There was no sign of Kylo, but there was a wolf sitting in front of the cabin, staring at the door.

“Hello,” she said to it, tentatively. She didn’t know if it could understand her. It seemed to be a regular wolf, smaller than the beast that Kylo had been under the full moon, such a light grey it was nearly white. It didn’t do anything, it didn’t react. _Is it here to guard me?_

She took a step out of the cabin and it did not move. She kept walking down the path and looked back over her shoulder. The wolf had gotten to its feet and was trotting after her, panting slightly, puffs of hot air turning to mist in front of its face.

She did not doubt it would leap at her if she tried to run.

The camp, village, whatever it was—it was full of people and wolves, though to Rey’s eyes there seemed to be more of the latter than the former. The people watched her curiously as she made her way through the houses, and the wolves stared at her with eyes that she hoped weren’t hungry. No one spoke to her. Indeed, they all stopped speaking at the sight of her. One of them even pointed and she could have sworn she’d heard her say, “ _That’s her_.”

Rey tried not to let it weigh on her. She tried to focus on gathering as much information about her surroundings as she could. Because no matter what she had said to Kylo the night before, she was determined to escape—to live and warn Finn and Leia. She could play the docile prisoner for as long as it took her to find a weakness and exert herself when she saw an opening.

And Kylo…

Well, he couldn’t be surprised that this was her plan, could he? She was being honest with him at every step of the way. That was why he had tied her damned legs together in the first place, to keep her from running.

The wolf had kept trotting after her as she explored, but when she neared the edge of the encampment, it sprung forward and blocked her path.

“Yes, I got that,” she muttered to it as it began shepherding her back towards the cabins, growling and snapping its jaws.

“I wouldn’t try to run.”

She whirled and found herself face to face with Armitage.

He was shorter than she was, and wearing a heavy dark coat that Rey was almost jealous of in this cold. She was slightly taller than he was and stood up all the straighter just to show him that fact.

“I’m not trying to run,” she lied. “I was trying to go for a walk.”

“So that you could run,” he said. Oddly, he was smiling. “I promise you, that road is far worse than if you stay. There’s only death that way and here, there’s life.”

Rey frowned at him. “I thought you don’t trust me,” she said. “I thought you want to kill me.”

“Oh,” Armitage said lightly, and his smile grew patronizing so very quickly. “I would absolutely prefer you dead to destroying our cause. But as Ren mentioned last night, you would be an asset if you could be convinced. I understand that he is a wild man—uncontrollable. Not all of us are like that, and I hope that you understand that he is not necessarily the emblem of the pack. Strong men….they are very used to getting their way in all things. But the clever wolf waits for the right opportunity to rise. I hope you are more clever than strong.”

He looked around. “Come, let me walk you back to his cabin. I wouldn’t want you to be in danger just because you’ve disappeared—even for something as innocent as a walk.”

He offered Rey his arm as though he were a gentleman. Rey found herself taking it before she knew what was happening, and then it was too late to let it go for he had placed his other hand on top of hers and held it there.

People stared even more at Rey now that she was walking arm in arm with Armitage through the houses again, but with a look from his cold, blue eyes, the starers turned away, as though they wouldn’t dare stare at him without permission.

“This pack,” Armitage told her. “It is the product of years hard work on the part of our master. He built it from the shattered remnants of Vader’s. And look how much we’ve grown.”

“I’m not from here,” Rey shrugged. “I don’t know anything about Vader’s pack.”

“Oh?” Armitage asked. “Ren didn’t tell you?”

“Ren?”

“Kylo.” He spat the name as though it tasted particularly vile on his tongue. “Kylo Ren. The name he gave himself when he transformed. He couldn’t face his past, I think. Wanted to run from it, or pretend it was never his. Coward,” he added. “There is pride to be had in where you come from—what you had to overcome to be who you are.”

Rey could relate to that, which made her uncomfortable. This man had threatened to kill her, would do so gladly, she did not doubt. He was being polite to her now, that much was true, but she did not trust him as far as she could spit. But she could not deny that there was a pride that she held firmly inside her of all she’d become.

“Didn’t Snoke ever tell you not to play with your food before eating it?” came a cool, drawling voice and Armitage paused. The tall woman with the icy gaze from the night before was standing there, six wolves at her side. Rey made to withdraw her hand from Armitage’s grip, but he held onto it firmly.

“How do you know he didn’t tell me to do just that?” Armitage responded coyly.

“You’re going to land yourself with a terrible case of Kylo at your throat if you don’t let her go,” the woman pointed out.

“My dear Phasma, I’m quite confident that whatever Kylo wants and whatever ends up happening never align.”

He let Rey go, though, but not before raising her hand to his lips and pressing a kiss to the back of it. “A pleasure. I hope you will agree.” Then he turned and left Rey standing there with Phasma watching her closely.

“Play what games you like,” the other woman said. “But I doubt very much it will save your skin. Scum like you doesn’t last long.”

#

When she returned to the cabin, Kylo was cooking.

It shouldn’t have surprised her. He had, after all, cooked on the road—and quite well. He had cooked the night before as well. But there was a difference between cooking over an open fire and stirring a pot that’s hanging over a fire, testing flavors on a long wooden spoon because you have the luxury of having flavors and not just skewered rabbit.

He looked up when she came in and almost immediately his face clouded. But he did not ask her where she’d been, or what she’d been doing. Instead, he nodded towards a bowl and she came and sat down next to him, ready to eat, noticing only as she did so that he had found a second chair for her. She ate down the stew he’d made and was prepared to lick the bowl clean when he spooned another helping into it without a word.

She looked up at him.

“Just take it,” he said. “There’s no ulterior motive. You’re hungry and should eat.”

“Everything you do will have an ulterior motive,” she retorted.

“I suppose it would save everyone a lot of trouble if I starved you to death,” he muttered under his breath.

That was what made her take the food.

It annoyed her how good it tasted. It tasted better than some of the food in Leia’s kitchens. Or maybe she was just hungry.

“How on earth,” she muttered after her third bite, “did the son of a lady learn to cook like this?”

“When you have trouble sleeping as a boy and are hungry but everyone’s asleep, you teach yourself,” he said.

“You taught yourself?” Rey asked.

“Yes,” he said evenly.

“I taught myself to cook, but I can’t cook like this,” she blurted out.

He paused, watching her carefully. “Maybe that’s because you don’t have as good food to begin with in Jakku,” he said.

“You’re not wrong,” Rey muttered. There had barely been any food in Jakku, much less any food to cook, much less any food to cook like _this_.

She looked at him for a long moment, taking him in.

He was a powerful man, she could see that in the way he carried himself—well over six feet tall and seemingly uninterested in diminishing his presence. Always, he seemed, to be waiting for her, showing her parts of him she somehow doubted he showed to anyone else. She could only imagine Armitage mocking him for it; she could imagine Snoke trying to choke it out of him. _What strength does it show that it isn’t gone yet._

The cut across his face was healing. His hair was long and it looked less grimy than it had, as though he had washed it. He wore a loose-fitting dark shirt, and tight-fitting dark pants like the ones that he had worn while Rey had been thrown over his shoulder, unable to look at anything but his ass. And his eyes burned in the dim light of the cabin, somehow gold, somehow black. She remembered the eyes of the wolf.

“Let me be clear about one thing,” Rey said slowly, “I will not—never—agree to become a wolf. Nothing you can do or say will convince me.”

Kylo didn’t say a word, but she thought she saw his eyes harden slightly.

She took a deep breath, wondering if she was brave enough to say the second part of it.

She wasn’t.

“Thank you for the food,” she said instead as she took another bite of the stew.

#

It was early when the knock came. Beside her on the floor, Kylo stirred. Sometime, in the night, he had rolled closer to her. Before her mind had fully wakened, she’d been idly pleased with the feel of him, warm at her side.

Another knock came, and she shook that thought from her as he got slowly to his feet, stretching his arms up over his head and cracking his neck as he walked to the door.

“What do you want?” he asked when the door opened.

The response was too quiet for Rey to hear but a moment later, Kylo was saying, “Damn,” and he was going back into the cabin to grab his vest.

“Are you leaving her here?” he person on the other side of the door asked. It was a woman’s voice.

“She won’t get far,” he said.

“And do you really want Phasma to say you’re being negligent? She could be a spy.”

Kylo froze and he turned to look at Rey. Rey tried to look as innocent as she could, sitting there under her blankets. He crossed the cabin and grabbed her arm, jerking her to her feet. Then he thrust a cloak at her with a grunted, “It’s getting cold.” She hadn’t seen the cloak the night before. She wondered when he had gotten it. It was too short to be his to begin with.

He grabbed her upper arm again, his grip a little too hard before Rey snapped at him, “I don’t need to be dragged about like a rag doll,” and he let go of her as though she had magicked him off her.

Without another word, without another look, he made his way out of the house and Rey followed him.

It was colder outside than she thought it would be, and she tugged the cloak tight around her as she followed Kylo and the other woman through the camp. “It’s burning through them,” the woman was saying. “I don’t know what it comes from.”

“Does Snoke know?”

“Not yet. We wanted to come to you first.”

“We?”

“Etta. She’s sick too.”

Rey wondered if this woman noticed the way his steps faltered at her words. “And it’s just our flank?” Kylo asked.

“For now,” the woman said darkly. “Phasma’s greys haven’t caught it yet, and none of Hux’s weres.”

“So just mine,” Kylo said, and it was as though he had known it was coming. Then, growling low in his throat, “I’ll rip his throat out.” The woman said nothing, but Kylo sighed. “And then there’ll be civil war within the pack, and this will all have been for nothing.” He sounded so deflated at the prospect of it.

At the edge of the encampment, there was a section of tents, presumably for those who were not important enough to have their own cabins. Wolves roamed freely here, but a few of them whined as Kylo passed. He stopped abruptly, his eyes landing on one of them. The wolf yipped, and whined again, and cocked its head. Kylo cocked his, and flared his nostrils and made a gruff huffing noise. The wolf got to its feet and trotted along beside them.

“Did you just talk to it?” Rey asked him.

Kylo gave her a sidelong glance. “Her,” he corrected her. “Yes, I suppose. After a fashion.”

He didn’t elaborate though, which only annoyed Rey, so she said, “How?”

“I should have known you wouldn’t let it go that easily.”

“If you actually wanted me to join this pack, you’d explain some things to me,” Rey flared at once.

“And I thought I was to understand one thing?” he retorted. Rey felt herself flushing.

The other woman cut in. “Body language,” she says. “And some noises, though it sounds garbled when we’re not wolves ourselves. They have different body language from humans, but we can mimic it even when we’re not wolves. Don’t ever smile at them with teeth. They’ll think you’re baring them in attack.”

If Kylo was annoyed that the woman said something, he did not convey it in any way to Rey. He just kept walking until he stopped.

Rey could smell the sickness—the stale scent of excretion and vomit. She could smell the fear.

“Stay here,” Kylo told the woman.

“I’ve already been close to it,” she snapped.

“Stay,” he barked and she did.

But Rey followed him and he did not make her turn back. She followed him into a tent and there were three people in it, lying under blankets that smelled of sweat and vomit.

“Careful,” he said to one of them who tried to sit up when he got close.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Emry said you were sick,” he said. He sounded almost gentle, oddly paternal as he pressed a hand to the woman’s forehead.

“We were trying to help,” she said. “It got worse though.”

She fell silent as his hand seemed to tighten over her forehead. He closed his eyes, and Rey felt as though the earth were shaking and perfectly still all at once. Then he sat back on his heels, his eyes intent on the sick woman. “Drink as much water as you can. Boil it first.”

Then he got to his feet and hurried from the tent. Rey followed him.

Emry was standing a little way away. “How many aren’t sick?” he asked her.

“A third, maybe.”

“A _third_?” he practically shouted.

“As I said—it burned through them.”

“And how many have died?” he demanded angrily.

“Fifteen so far,” she said. “Probably more. A few of the greys and four weres.”

He repeated the instruction that she boil the water, then told her to make sure that everyone who was healthy bathed before and after helping with the sick. Then he led Rey back through the encampment, his gait heavy and purposeful.

But he did not lead her back to the cabin.

He marched straight through the houses until he found Phasma. “Your greys are going to get sick if you’re not careful with them,” he told her.

“Is that so?” Phasma asked.

“Yes,” he said. “Keep them away from mine.”

Phasma narrowed her eyes. “Is this some trick, Ren?”

“Do you suspect me of foul play?” he growled. “Or would you rather your greys die. I doubt Snoke would like that.”

Phasma turned away from him without a word but it didn’t matter. He was whirling about on his heel and marching back to his cabin.

He slammed the door behind them when Rey had entered, slammed it so hard it shook on its hinges. “Is this some trick, Ren?” he mimicked and laughed, crossing to the fire. It had burned low and he loaded it with wood again. Then he grabbed a kettle and went outside for a moment before returning, slamming the door again. “The nerve of her.” He hung the kettle from the hook over the fireplace and threw himself into a chair, brooding.

“Phasma leads the greys,” he said. “Hux and I each have some greys in our command, but mostly we command the weres. The greys are getting sick—you’d _think_ Phasma would care about that.”

“And you do?” she asked.

He gave her the sort of look that made her mouth go dry. “I’ll destroy my enemies,” he said. “With every fiber of my being, I will destroy them. But such destruction for those who serve me?” He let out a laugh that wasn’t even remotely humorous. “Even at my angriest, I wouldn’t. I’m not that sort of monster.”

“The woman who was sick,” she began.

“Etta.”

“Etta. She’s like…” Rey scrambled for words. For so much of her life, structures were beyond her. It was just her and the sands and the poor other people who lived there too. And then there’d been Raddus, and Leia’s court and Poe and his men, and Threepio and his, and Amilyn and hers, and Lando, and Chewie, and more than enough to make Rey’s head spin. “She’s like…”

“Like your Captain Dameron,” Kylo bit out. “She’s a lieutenant of mine. One of my knights, if we had knights. And she may well be dying.” He sounded lifeless all of a sudden, powerless.

“Can’t you heal her?” she asked. “Magic? That’s what you were doing in the tent, wasn’t it?”

He sighed and looked deflated as he ran his hands over his face. “Some things are easier than others,” he said. “And healing magic…” his gaze went distant, as though he were tracing his own thoughts. Then he shook himself. “Bodies are hard enough without magic running through them, and healing a human requires years of training that I just don’t have. The only person I know who can heal with magic apart from my dearest uncle is Maz Kanata, and even she is loathe to do it because there’s so much you can make a mistake on, and one mistake can mean a person’s life. A little bit of overcorrection and you’ve ruined something that should have been healthy.”

“I suppose that makes sense,” Rey said. And then, something that he’d said earlier came to mind again. “Who is Hux?”

“The one who wants to kill you,” he said. “Armitage Hux.”

“Oh.” She felt stupid, but pressed on. “You think he did this to your—your—”

“My wolves? Yes. I don’t know how, but it’s exactly the sort of thing he’d do.”

“What do you mean?”

Kylo barked out a laugh. “There’s no need to be condescending,” Rey snapped. “I don’t know the half of your stupid pack.”

“Forgive me,” he said and he sounded like he was trying to mean it, at least. “Hux and me—we—” he sighed. “We don’t get along. We want the same thing but only one of us can have it.”

“And what’s that?”

“Snoke isn’t going to live forever,” Kylo said. “He’s old, and frailer than he lets on. That head injury did a number on his nerves. And when he’s gone, we both want the pack. But only one of us can have it. If I had hard evidence that Hux had done this to my wolves, I’d take it to Snoke. He doesn’t stand for disloyalty. But there was magic in the illness and Hux—among the many things he _isn’t_ —is no warlock.”

He said it so matter-of-factly that Rey’s temper flared again.

“I suppose if you just killed Snoke, you could keep me here forever, then,” she said sarcastically. “Is that a plan you’ve considered?”

His eyes narrowed. “I would never kill my master.”

“You just circle him, waiting for him to die. A pack of hungry wolves.”

Kylo leaned forward, anger in his eyes now. “As opposed to what I’d be doing with my mother?” he demanded. “Isn’t that what heirs do? Wait for people to die?”

“So you get the pack,” she snapped at him. “You kill Hux and get the pack. You get everything you’ve ever wanted, then? Vader’s true legacy?”

“Yes,” he said stubbornly.

“And it’s worth everything you’re going through now to have that? Everything you’ve gone through?”

“It’s worth anything if it means I can become who I was meant to be.”

“Except you aren’t!” Rey fumed. “You _aren’t_ meant to be the next Snoke.”

“So I’m supposed to be the next Leia Organa? The next Han Solo? Because that wasn’t who I am. Not who I’m—”

“Just because you’re not the next Snoke doesn’t mean you are destined to be your parents. But you don’t get to be yourself like this. And isn’t that who you were meant to be?”

“I _make_ myself,” he retorted. “I carve my own path. I make my own choices. _Ben Solo_ ,” he said the name and his lips twisted in derision. “He is my past.” And his eyes seemed to burn through her. “Let the past die,” he told her. “Kill it, if you have to. That’s the only way to become who you were meant to be.”

#

Time passed strangely for Rey.

She was used to it moving so very slowly as she waited for something, anything to change, for someone, anyone, to come for her. She was used to staring at the stars overhead, too warm and too cold all at once in her little shack in the Jakku desert, wondering what it would be like when everything was different.

Time moved so quickly now. She was waiting—oh yes, she was waiting—waiting for the Full Moon, waiting for a way to test her luck and escape, waiting for _something._ But time went quickly. Even the slowest moving days did not inch along as they had on Jakku and the nights—

Rey didn’t know when it happened, or how. She still refused to sleep on his bed, and he did too. They lay together on the floor by the fire, wrapped in furs and blankets. But one morning, she woke with her face nuzzled against his chest and his arms wrapped around her. She knew that they had fallen asleep with their backs to one another. She knew that. They must have found one another in their sleep.

She tried to extricate herself from him without waking him. It didn’t work. They both flushed and stammered and pretended it hadn’t happened for the rest of the day, but when she woke again the next morning, it was with him curled around her back and—worse—his cock hard against her ass.

Kylo brought her with him when he went places for the most part. He left her behind when he went to meet with Snoke—which Rey was grateful for—but apart from that, he seemed to be heeding Emry’s comment that people wouldn’t like it if he left Rey to wander the pack by herself. He was right, of course—she wouldn’t get very far if she did try to run. It was the main reason that she hadn’t tried it already. Or at least—one of the main reasons.

She hadn’t told him that night the other thing she was clear on. She hadn’t wanted him to mock her, hadn’t wanted him to try and crush the hope in her breast, the reason she couldn’t bring herself to hate him. Because she didn’t. She wasn’t sure she could, for all he annoyed her and made her angry sometimes.

 _I want you to come with me when I leave,_ she thought as she watched him communicating with one of the greys using that odd combination of head movements and growly noises. _I want you to see that this place can’t be worse than what you left behind and to try that again. It will be different than it was.  It will have to be. Because you are different._

He was a wolf. As Vader had been.

“Why have I never heard of Vader before?” she asked him one day as they were walking back from the sick part of the pack. The sickness had spread, though it still rested predominantly in the part of the pack that followed Kylo.

He let out a humorless laugh.

“Because my mother likes to pretend he wasn’t her father,” he said. “Because she likes people to think she is the true heir to Bail Organa, not to Darth Vader. One who stood against the wolves, rather than one who became a wolf.”

“She didn’t tell you, did she,” Rey said quietly. She could hear the bitterness in his voice.

“No,” he said angrily. “She didn’t. She left me to find out, all on my own, and then when I did, didn’t even apologize for lying to me. She thought I would understand, given _all that Vader was.”_ He whined the last words in a mocking tone that was jarringly close to the way that Leia Organa spoke. But of course he would be able to mimic her. She was his mother.

“He terrorized people,” Rey said quietly.

“And my mother doesn’t send people to their deaths? She claims her reasons are better, is all.”

“And what reason did Vader have?” Rey asked. “Asking people to defend themselves and others from an aggressor is different from being the aggressor.”

“And what are you asking them to defend?” he demanded. “A pitiful life?”

Rey opened her mouth to protest something—and loudly—when he cut her off. “Farmers starve. Lords take too much in taxes, and then send their knights after those who can’t pay.”

“Your mother doesn’t—”

“My mother isn’t the only noble out there. The system she asks others to defend in her name is broken. She shares the same title as that lord who let you starve in Jakku, doesn’t she?”

“Your mother is _not_ Unkar Plutt,” Rey said savagely.

“And how many other lords can say the same as they let their people starve? How many domains did you pass through on your way to Raddus? How much suffering did you see with your own two eyes?”

“And the pack is better? Just because the bruises faded doesn’t mean he didn’t try to strangle you. Would he kill others for failing him as well?”

“Does my mother?”

Now she actually _did_ let out an angry growl. “Never,” she spat. “Not ever. Failure is not something to _punish_. Failure is the punishment—and the lesson.”

“You sound like my uncle,” Kylo snapped. “He failed. Do you think that he learned his lesson?”

“I don’t know—I haven’t met Luke Skywalker,” she retorted hotly. “Maybe he _did_ learn his lesson. You didn’t stick around long enough to find out.”

“And if I had stuck around, he definitely wouldn’t have learned it. Why did _I_ have to be the lesson he had to learn?” His voice cracked. He flushed and looked away.

 _Of course it hurts,_ Rey thought. _He was your uncle. He was supposed to love you, to protect you. Of course it hurts._

She couldn’t talk about her parents without her throat getting thick with tears too.

“Is that why you let him choke you? Because you aren’t his lesson like you were your uncle’s?”

He recoiled as if she had slapped him. “I don’t _let_ him do anything,” Kylo bit out. “I—”

“Are you afraid that he will be just as bad as your uncle was if you admit that he hurts you?”

“He doesn’t hurt me.”

Perhaps it was because he was denying the truth of it, just as he had when he’d brought up his name that goaded her to say it.

“Ben—” and his expression changed so fast that Rey almost forgot what she was going to say. His eyes get soft, his face went slack, and his lips sprang apart in surprise. _No one has called him Ben in a long time._

_I’m going to._

“Ben, he does. And you don’t deserve it.”

“I thought I was a monster,” he said wryly, an attempt of a smile at his lips.

“Are you a monster because you were made to be one, or because you have always been one?”

“I don’t know,” he said slowly after a moment. “Ask my uncle.”

#

She woke alone again one morning about a week after she had arrived. The fire was burning happily next to her, but Kylo was nowhere in sight. When she poked her head out of the cabin door, there was no sign of him.

He had left food for her, though, which she ate before the fire.

She was glad of the fire. It was getting colder and colder out, the nights were growing longer and Rey had never liked the cold.

Deserts were confusing places—too hot during the day, and too cold at night. And as much as Rey had hated the heat, she had hated the cold far worse, because it was the cold that had reminded her that she was alone, that she had been left behind. But he’d made sure the fire was hot for her before he’d gone wherever he’d gone.

 _Probably to the sick,_ she thought. He didn’t go for very long, but he went every day—even if it was just to talk to Emry about how many more were sick, how many had died, how many had recovered. Phasma had moved her greys to the other side of the encampment and Hux, it seemed, had ordered his wolves out on a ranging to keep them away from Kylo’s sick until they were either dead or recovered. Rey couldn’t tell if the camp seemed emptier because of it, but it certainly seemed possible.

She heard the door open and turned, expecting to see Kylo looking glum the way he always did when he returned from the sick, but it wasn’t Kylo.

It was Snoke.

“May I join you?” he asked. He did not wait for a reply, entering the cabin as though it were his and not Kylo’s.

Rey didn’t say a word.

“You care about him, don’t you?” he asked her at last.

Rey did not respond. Then she realized that was a mistake, for it told him the truth far more quickly than if she’d lied.

He let out a low laugh. “What a wonder—the way that history repeats itself. Vader made himself weak for a woman too, did you know?”

“He is not making himself weak for me,” Rey snapped.

“Oh, but he is. Do you think that Kylo Ren wouldn’t have snapped your neck at the first opportunity if you were anyone else? You are a threat. You serve his much-detested mother. But here you are, enjoying his fire, eating his food, and wrapped in his blankets. He is weak. Just like Vader was, before his wife died.”

Rey looked at him and Snoke smiled at her. “Oh yes. She died. Why do you think his children were raised separately, and neither of them by the mother? She died and Vader ascended.” He observed her. “Another reason to let Hux kill you, I suppose. Perhaps from your death, Kylo can truly become all he was meant to be. Ordinarily, I’d make him kill you, but you have weakened him too much for that, I think.”

“If he’s so weak, why don’t you kick him out of your pack?” she demanded. “Why don’t you let the wilds take him?”

“Because even at his weakest, he is strong enough. And I would not throw away a weapon like him for anything. For all I know, such an act would send him straight back to Leia Organa, tail between his legs, begging his mother’s forgiveness and telling her all he knows. I’d sooner kill him than release him. But it won’t come to that.”

“No?” Rey asked.

“No. Even a rabid dog has its uses. And besides—you care about him. And you won’t want me to kill him. Which means when the moon turns, you will give me everything.”

“I will give you _nothing_.”

Snoke leered at her. “So you’d sacrifice him? Perhaps it is you who is Vader’s true heir—made of blood and iron.”

“Get out,” Rey spat at him.

“You command me as though this is your house? It is not even Kylo’s. It is _mine_.”

“Get out,” Rey said again and this time, she tried lacing her words with what paltry magic she could pretend to know.

It only made Snoke laugh again.

“The moon waxes, young Rey. Consider your options carefully.”

And he did leave.

Rey sat there, trembling with rage for a moment. Then she got to her feet and ran from the house. She wouldn’t leave the camp. She wasn’t so stupid as to try that. But she wouldn’t just sit there, stewing in her rage.

The wolf who had followed her the first day was outside as well, and it followed her along the road. “I’m not going anywhere,” she told it. “So you don’t have to follow me.”

But that didn’t stop its tailing her.

She wished she had her spear. If she had her spear, she could stick it, bait it into a fight or send it running in fear of her. Instead she was stuck with a tail that Kylo had likely put on her to keep her from running. Or to keep her safe.

“What’s wrong?” She hadn’t even noticed Armitage Hux as she’d stormed through the encampment. She’d thought he’d gone off hunting with his wolves. Apparently she’d been wrong. “Did Ren do something?”

“Nothing happened,” she told him in a clipped voice. Kylo didn’t trust him, thought that he’d kill him if given the chance. And no matter what he said, he had promised to kill her at the full moon if she hadn’t agreed to become a wolf.

“I doubt that,” he said, his voice gentle. “Come. Tell me. I’ll help if I can.”

“Help?” she asked. “Help? And what sort of help is that going to be, pray tell? The sort where you poison more of Kylo’s wolves in order to—”

Hux cut her off with a roll of his eyes. “I told Snoke I had nothing to do with it, but by all means, let Kylo say what he will. He’s paranoid, and has been ever since he got here. Thinks everyone’s always out to get him. I can assure you—I am not out to get him.” He said it with a slight smirk, a condescension that automatically had Rey’s hackles up. He noticed that, though and sighed. “Listen, I will be honest—I think he is dangerous and uncontrollable and that is a bad combination. It puts the whole pack at risk, and he shouldn’t be given power to hold because of it. Your presence alone is enough to show that. But that doesn’t mean I’m out for his blood, or even that I think that Snoke is wrong to try and raise him to power of some sort. I’m trying to be reasonable—which is more than I can say of Ren.”

Rey raised an eyebrow, and Hux shook his head and shrugged. “But of course. He has isolated you so you can only see his perspective. It is a classic tactic when trying to make a captive do your bidding—make them see your humanity and then they’ll believe everything you say. If you ever tire of his stories, come to me and I shall give you a…different perspective. Now,” he glanced at the wolf and at Rey. “I rather think you should be going back to your cabin. You wouldn’t want him to get angry that you’ve disappeared on him, would you? He can be…quite a lot to handle when in a temper. I won’t walk you back this time. You seem not to wish for my company and I can take a hint.”

He paused again. “I do hope you’ll consider what I’ve said. And I do also hope you’ll consider the situation you’re in carefully. The pack is not what Ren says it is, but that doesn’t make it a terrible place. It would be such a pity for you to lose your life out of stubborn pride because of something foolish he has done.”

Rey stared after Armitage as he went off. He stood tall and proud and did not look back at her to see if she was watching him.

“What was _that_?” she muttered to herself. Part of her wondered if Hux thought she was stupid that she couldn’t tell when someone was trying to manipulate her. But another part of what he said stuck in her mind all the way back to Kylo’s cabin. _But of course. He has isolated you so you can only see his perspective._

Did she only see his perspective?

Did he only see Snoke’s?

#

She decided that honesty was the best tactic.

Mostly because she couldn’t think of what else to do, and she got the sense that if Snoke was manipulating Kylo, and if he’d spent his youth with his mother lying to him and his uncle doing whatever it was that had led his uncle to try and kill him, that honesty was the only thing he’d respond to.

“Snoke came to talk to me today,” she told him when they were having dinner in his cabin that night. Kylo blinked at her and frowned. “When you were out,” she added. So casually, as if they were equals, as if they were partners and not as though she was his captive. _And if he is a captive too? Does that make me a captive’s captive?_

“What did he want?” Kylo asked slowly.

“He wanted me to agree to become a wolf, I think,” she said. “But he didn’t say it quite that way.” She took a deep breath. “He thinks I weaken you—that you care too much about me and it makes you weak.”

Kylo glared at her. “Nothing makes me weak,” he said angrily. “Least of all you.” With the anger in his face and voice, the words shouldn’t have made her breath catch in her throat. But it did. Which meant she knew what she needed to do.

“I agree,” she said. “But Snoke doesn’t. And so long as this goes on, he will continue to think it.”

“And what do you want me to do about it. Bite you? I thought we were clear about one thing and that was that no matter what, you didn’t want to be bitten.”

“I don’t,” she snapped. “But surely you must hear what he said and—”

“I didn’t hear what he said. I heard what you thought he said.”

“So you trust him more than me?” Rey hadn’t meant to ask it. She hadn’t meant to think it. She certainly hated the pause as he took the words in, as he considered them. Because why should he trust her when she couldn’t trust him?

“Why should I trust you?” he asked at last, asked slowly.

“A question I’ve been wondering myself,” Rey muttered. “Isn’t that why I’m here to begin with? Because you trusted me? Because you thought I cared about you? Have I _ever_ been anything other than honest with you?”

But far from convincing him, that just made his frown deepen. “That sounds like something someone who is lying to me would say,” he said slowly.

“I’m not lying,” she said. “I’m not a liar.”

“And how would I know that?”

“Don’t you see how you are talking yourself in circles?” Rey demanded. “Bending over backward because you _want_ to believe something that every instinct is telling you not to believe?”

“And what do you know of my instincts?” he demanded. “And what’s more, what do you care?”

“What?” Rey blinked.

“You said it the first night—you would always care about Finn more than me. If you’ve only ever been honest with me, is that not the truth?”

Rey gaped at him. Because it was the truth. But couldn’t he see how the two were different? “There’s a vast difference between caring more about Finn than you and not caring about you at all.”

“You said I was your enemy. How can I trust you not to be sowing seeds of discord between me and my master?”

“Did he say that to you? Does he think that’s what I’m doing?”

And suddenly Kylo was on his feet, running his hands through his hair in his agitation. Without a word, he stormed out of the cabin and slammed the door behind him.

“I’m not lying to you!” Rey shouted after him.

She finished her food and curled up under her blankets.

And she wished she didn’t, she truly wished she didn’t, but Hux’s words pressed into her mind as she tried to make herself fall asleep, about how he had a temper, about how he was paranoid, about how he was unreasonable. _Snoke did that to him,_ she thought feebly.

She wondered if she’d made it worse.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am pretending that Emry is Keri Russell and there's nothing anyone can do to stop me ~~except JJ Abrams, but he hasn't released her role so LET ME LIVE~~


	4. Chapter 4

He was not there when she woke the next morning and his blankets looked undisturbed. He had not come back.

Rey stared at his blankets for a long moment. _He didn’t come back, he didn’t come back, he didn’t come back,_ rang through her head in time with her beating heart.

 _It’s not the same,_ she told herself.

Unless he’d left her to die too.

Had she made him so angry the night before where he’d do that? Surely not. If he wanted her dead, he’d have just killed her himself, the way Snoke wanted him to.

There wasn’t any food that she could find in the cabin, so she grabbed the cloak he had given her in the first few days in the encampment, wrapped it around her shoulders, and went out into the cold morning.

Snow was swirling in the air, light, gentle, lazy. It would be beautiful if she didn’t feel anxiety deep down in her gut. _I do care,_ she thought sadly.

There wasn’t even a grey outside to follow her through the encampment as she made her way…she didn’t even know where. Kylo had always been in charge of the food. She had liked that. She had liked not having to worry about feeding herself. It was a luxury. Now she didn’t even know where to go for it—not that that particularly daunted her. She was a scavenger by necessity and did not doubt it would be easier to find something to eat than on Jakku.

If she didn’t have to steal from wolves, that was. She hoped she wouldn’t. She was a fighter, sure, but she was unarmed and there were so many more of them than her. Anxiety gnawed at her.   What if he didn’t come back at all? What if he abandoned her to starvation and Hux, just to prove a point? Somehow it was the abandoning and starvation part that hurt the most. She could take Hux. She’d figure out a way if he tried to kill her.

“They fought?”

Rey paused. Phasma’s voice was quiet, but Rey heard it all the same.

“Yes,” Hux replied and she held her breath. “At least, I assume so. Why else would he have run off for the woods like that unless he was trying not to lose control _at_ her. It’s been a long time since he’s been like this.”

“At this rate, he’ll be unstable before too long—so much so that even Snoke will see it.”

“Do you really think Snoke doesn’t see it? He’s livid about the whole situation.”

“I haven’t seen you smile like that in a while,” Phasma said, and Rey could hear amusement dripping in her voice. “Glad at the prospect of finally being rid of him?”

“And you aren’t? Snoke’s obsession with making Ren his version of Vader blinds him to the reality of it all: he’s never been committed. He’s just a wounded cur. And he’ll only get worse. But then again, he arrived to us broken to begin with.”

“And the girl?” Phasma asked.

“Snoke has plans for her,” Hux said. “But I won’t spoil the surprise for you.”

“Armitage, you tease.”

“Let me have my fun. The girl—she has a place in all this, though. Don’t you worry.”

Rey’s heart was in her throat as she turned on her heel and hurried back to the cabin.

It was only when she was almost there that she remembered: even if she did tell Kylo, he wouldn’t believe her in all likelihood. And besides, he wasn’t even there. He probably wasn’t even talking to her.

_And Hux called him paranoid. Of course he is, when Hux is feeding that paranoia._

The cabin was indeed empty when she got there, and she set herself to rebuilding the fire since it had gone out. She was just sitting back on her heels, quite content with the way that the flame was crackling around the wood when she heard something outside that she couldn’t quite place.

She went to the door.

Kylo was dragging a bear out of the woods.

A dead bear.

By himself.

He stopped short when he saw her, and she saw a flush creeping up his face. He had dark circles under his eyes again. He clearly had not slept since he’d left the cabin. Because he’d been killing a bear.

“Hi,” he said, clearly unable to think of anything else to say.

“Hi,” she replied.

They stood there, staring at one another for a long while.

Then he seemed to remember that he was holding the leg of a dead bear in his hands and he kept dragging it towards the house. When he was closer, he paused and let go of the bear’s leg, which dropped to the ground with a thunk. He scratched his head, thinking. “I don’t think it’ll fit through the door,” he said at last.

“No,” Rey agreed.

“So I should clean it out here.”

“Probably.”

“Would you—” he swallowed. “Would you like to help?”

“I—all right.”

He was clearly trying to apologize. Or impress her. Possibly both? She’d never had anyone bring home a dead bear before. She hadn’t even realized that she’d started thinking about Kylo’s cabin as _home_ until that very moment.

They skinned the thing and cut out its guts, which Kylo gave to some of the gathered greys. Then he cut off a portion of the meat for himself before calling to one of the other weres nearby. “Smoke it,” he told the were, who nodded and brought it away.

He put several chunks of meat into the pot he made stew in and set it over the fire before turning to her.

“I do trust you,” he said slowly. Shakily. As though it cost him more than she could understand to say. “But I also—”

“You don’t believe me,” she said quietly.

He jerked his head in a nod. He looked away from her, at the meat that was starting to sizzle.

She wondered if she should tell him what she’d heard Hux and Phasma saying, but after last night, she thought it was better not to.

Her stomach rumbled and his eyes snapped back to hers.

“We should get onions, potatoes—things to cook with it,” he said and off they went—this time to a long cabin that Rey hadn’t seen before which contained exactly the foodstuffs he’d mentioned. He didn’t pay anything. Rey got the sense that they didn’t use money in this encampment. Currency came in different forms. It was almost like Jakku in that regard. Then they returned to the cabin and he quickly cut an onion and added a potato to the meat.

“I’m sorry—it will take longer to cook. I know you’re hungry,” he said quietly.

Rey shrugged. She’d been hungrier. She was just glad that he was back and that the anxiety that had been gnawing at her stomach that morning was gone.

“I trust you,” he said again. “But I do think there are things you don’t understand—that you can’t understand. That you’re blinded by what you want to see, what you hate in Snoke. I know he made a bad first impression—” Rey’s eyebrows shot up and Kylo’s voice quickened, “But I promise you he is no worse than my mother or my uncle. No one is perfect when they hold power. And at least he isn’t my blood. It hurts worse, coming from blood.”

Oh, how truly Rey knew that. But at the same time, hearing the words from his lips, she was not convinced. She was sure she did not look convinced either. “I don’t think this is right,” she whispered to him. “Something doesn’t fit, Ben. Surely you know that?”

His face did the same thing it had done when she’d last called him Ben.

“Why do you keep calling me Ben?” he asked quietly.

“Because—” she thought of Hux. She didn’t trust Hux, didn’t like Hux, but she thought Hux had the right of it, “Because I think you became Kylo to hide from being Ben. And I don’t think that makes you not Ben. I think that means that you are frightened of Ben.”

“I’m not,” he said firmly. “I told you—let the past die.”

“Then forgive your mother,” she replied evenly. “If the past is truly dead, let it be gone. Forgive her, and look to your present where you are surrounded by those who wish you ill.” He opened his mouth to argue. “Perhaps your future doesn’t lie with her—but it doesn’t have to lie _here_.”

#

The bear meat lasted them a full week. A week, in which Kylo’s part of the pack slowly began to heal. But still, many of them had died, and the ones who survived were weakened.

Snoke was not happy about it. Kylo didn’t say as much, but Rey could tell from how irascibly he behaved when he returned from his sessions with Snoke. He did not take it out on Rey, as Hux had suggested he might. He usually went off into the woods by himself for a long time. Sometimes, she thought she heard his shouts echo through the trees, but maybe she was just imagining it.

Hux tried to talk to her three more times while she was on her own. She could tell that he had been watching her closely because she was so rarely on her own when she left the cabin. For the most part, she left with Kylo. Each time, he warned her about how unstable Kylo was, about how angry he was, about how he would try to control her and command her. Then, in the same breath, he would tell her how the pack would benefit from her presence. If she’d had her spear, she would have stuck him with it and had done with it. But she didn’t have her spear, and he had sworn to kill her, so she merely answered as politely as she could while still managing to make abundantly clear that she neither liked nor trusted him.

Evenings were spent quietly, for the most part, when Kylo was not off in the woods letting his anger explode out of him. He whittled, and told her about the pack. He told her of his vanguard—six weres he called his knights. He told her of how he had learned about the pack as a boy and had always thought they only wrought evil because of Darth Vader. “But they’re not evil,” he told her. She even started to see what he meant, the more she went out among them with him. The greys were playful and familial with one another, the weres had strong friendships and stronger loyalties. She could see what about the pack would appeal to a man who felt driven away by his family. _Pack is more than family, greater than family,_ she thought.

Once he brought a wreath of dried leaves that were orange and yellow and red home and hung it on the wall near the fire where it would get decent light. He ducked his gaze and flushed a little and it took her longer than she wanted to admit that he had brought it back because he had thought—correctly—that it might be pretty.

Under any other circumstances, she thought she might be wooed.

But then she remembered Snoke, how he called Kylo weak while also seeming to stoke his rage, to make him feel lesser than, to make him hate himself. _Perhaps the individuals in the pack aren’t all evil,_ she thought. _But there’s a snake at the head, and that bleeds into the entire pack._

She was sure that Kylo would say the same of his mother.

He had not mentioned his mother once since their conversation while the bear stew had cooked. He had not mentioned his uncle, and he still never mentioned his father. But there was something different in him now. He seemed oddly calmer—even while Snoke made him angry—whenever he was in Rey’s presence. And never again did he imply that he didn’t trust her, or that she might not care about him.

Rey was glad of that. Because the more time she spent with him, the more she thought she did care about him. More than she should. Far more than she should. She tried to think of Finn—of friendship and brotherhood. And it wasn’t that she didn’t value those things, that she didn’t care for Finn, hope daily that the damage Kylo had done him as a wolf was easily reparable—it was just that her heart had belied her tongue when she’d told Kylo she’d never care for him as much as she would care about Finn.

Because she did.

She did, and she didn’t know what to do about that because it only made her clearer in the truth that she hadn’t told him of in one of their first nights together, the path that—increasingly—she thought was the only way for both of them to make it out of here alive. _Just because I never said it explicitly doesn’t mean he doesn’t know,_ she thought. _He has to know._

A week before the full moon, Kylo returned from a session with Snoke—but this time, he was not enraged and ready to run for the trees. This time, he was calm. “I’m leaving for a few days,” he told her. “We’re low on food, and too many were sick for a usual hunting party, so I’m going with the hunters.”

“How many of them are yours and how many are Hux’s?” she asked at once.

He snorted. “Are you worrying after me?” It took her a moment to realize he was teasing her.

“Yes,” she said firmly.

The amused smile at his lips faded into a softer one. “I can handle Hux. And his men,” he said. “He may not think it, but I’m more than a match for them, I promise.”

“And if you’re not?” she asked him.

“You have nothing to worry about,” he said. “I will keep you safe.”

“I can keep myself safe, or don’t you remember?” The words came out more teasingly than she intended and before she could stop it, her hand reached up to trace the scar on his face.

His nostrils flared and his eyes locked hers in place as her thumb traced its way down. His skin was not soft. The increasing cold was dry and she could feel that under her thumb. But it was warm. So very warm. Almost—

“You have a fever.”

“What?” he said, sounding confused. “I feel fine.”

“You’re hot.” She grabbed his hand and dragged it to his forehead. “Don’t you feel it?”

“Oh,” he said and then he smiled and her heart fluttered because his whole face changed when he smiled. He looked younger in his happiness—and beautiful. “Werewolves run warmer than humans, just as wolves do. It’s fine.”

That at least explained how it had taken him until the week before to put on a cloak. She wondered that she hadn’t noticed the first time she’d touched him, how she hadn’t noticed it curled against his chest while they slept.

It took her a moment to realize she was still holding his hand to his forehead. She released it, and felt her face heating.

“I’m not worried about me,” she said. “At least, not more than I have been.” She’d be a liar if she pretended she hadn’t woken up in the middle of the night the night before, dreams of sharp wolfish teeth snapping at her, her heart hammering in her chest. _Only a week until Hux kills me_. It had been oddly calming that Kylo had been lying on the ground next to her, his face turned towards her in the darkness. “I’m worried about you.”

The look he gave her was positively tender.

That frightened her more than anything else.

“I’ll be careful,” he promised her. “I won’t leave you.”

She knew he meant in the long term, she knew he meant by dying, but it wasn’t until he had gone off with the other wolves that she let herself truly feel those words as tears fell from her lips and she wrapped her arms around her legs as though she were a little girl all over again.

#

When had she gotten so used to him? How had that happened?

The empty cabin had gone from feeling like home to like her shack in Jakku—desolate and haunted with memories of not being alone. But unlike her child’s memories on Jakku, she remembered vividly Kylo’s presence in his own house. She remembered waking up with her face pressed against his chest, remembered the way he cooked his own food and the way he made sure that she always had something to eat.

How jarring it was now to be here without him. More jarring than anything in her life had been from the moment she met Finn and everything was new again. And when the loneliness of it threatened to overtake her, she found her fingers tracing the braided bronze ring that Maz Kanata had given her. It settled her heart somehow. _But there is someone who still can._

She went to the fire pits to eat. She’d never done that before. Kylo had always cooked for her, and he had offered to make one of his lieutenants cook for her but she had just shaken her head. “I can scrounge for myself,” she told him and he nodded and told her where to go.

The weres at the fire pit were, for the most part, recovering from illness. They looked at her with curious, tired eyes but did not approach her.

“That’s her,” she heard one of them whisper on the first day that Kylo had gone when she went to fill up the bowl she’d brought with her from Kylo’s house. “That’s his bitch.”

She whirled and glared and it took her a moment to remember that she was surrounded by a pack of wolves. Perhaps _bitch_ didn’t mean the same thing to them as it did to her. The were who had spoken had certainly looked surprised at her outrage and Rey stared at them, suddenly confused.

“They don’t mean it cruelly,” came a voice she recognized and she saw Etta standing there.

“You’re not on the hunt?” Rey asked. Etta shook her head.

“No, Kylo didn’t want me slowing the pack down.” She rolled her eyes and shared a look that Rey assumed she was supposed to understand. “I think that was his way of saying I still needed to recover.”

“Are you feeling better?” Rey asked. Etta smiled.

“Still short of breath sometimes. I don’t know what that was. It didn’t feel—normal. It didn’t feel natural. I can’t explain it.”

 _Probably because it was Hux,_ she thought bitterly but knew better than to say aloud, surrounded by the pack. Or maybe she should. They probably all knew that Hux was scheduled to kill her in several days. _Why am I not more concerned with that?_ She hadn’t been lying when she’d told Kylo she was more worried about him than Hux.

“They don’t mean it cruelly,” Emry repeated though. “It’s just—just a term. They know he’s chosen you and why, and they expect him to bite you and then you’ll be his and you’ll matter even more than you do.” She shrugged. “We like hierarchies and clear roles. You’re not clear now, but you will be.”

 _When I’m dead,_ she thought. _Why_ was she so convinced she wasn’t going to die? Even if she _could_ escape Hux, there were more than enough werewolves and grey wolves here to kill her. And Kylo—

_He’ll try to keep me alive._

She knew it was the truth, somehow. Despite Snoke, she somehow knew he would. How had her faith in him grown to this? Especially when he seemed so concerned that she would die.

She ate with Etta among the recovering weres, then returned to Kylo’s cabin.

And then, because she was bored, because she knew she would have to fight for her life, even if Kylo would try to keep her alive, she began to do some of the strengthening exercises she’d learned from Poe when she had first arrived in Raddus. Her muscles screamed. She had not used them like this in weeks.

She woke sore the next day, but determined to do more of it. She did press ups for her arms, and lunges for her legs and she had nothing close to a staff, but she did grab the heavy spoon that Kylo used to cook and brandished it like a sword. She was not good at sword fighting the way she was with a spear, but anything was better than something, she supposed.

 _What would Hux do if I fought him with a wooden spoon,_ she wondered. She almost giggled at the idea of thwacking him across a wolfish snout with it.

Time went faster when she was using her body. She had forgotten what it was to sweat since the forest was cold with the oncoming winter. Her body ached, but it was a good ache, a working ache, and when she settled down to rest, it was easier to fall asleep having done something. She had tossed and turned the first night that Kylo was gone, aware that it was only her breath that filled the empty cabin, but she felt positively relaxed as she curled up under her blankets and went to sleep.

#

Rey woke to shouting.

“You scared them off!” That was definitely Kylo bellowing through the darkness.

Whatever the response was, Rey could not hear it, but she did hear the inarticulate growl that Kylo was making and she grabbed her cloak and bolted out of the cabin.

It did not take long for her to find them. They were in the clearing in front of Snoke’s cabin where Kylo had brought her the first night they’d arrived at the pack.

Kylo had his hand around Hux’s throat.

“Do it,” Hux choked at him. His face was getting positively purple. “Do it. If you’ve got the guts.”

“Ben,” Rey breathed.

No one seemed to notice her. But Kylo twitched and she saw him angle his head slightly and she knew he knew she was there.

He threw Hux to the ground and the other man sputtered. Kylo stood there, staring over him, his hands balled into fists, his shoulders rising and falling heavily in time with his breathing. Rey could not see his face. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

To her surprise, Hux began to laugh. “Look at this!” he said. “Ren’s been domesticated by a bitch who won’t even have him!”

“Kylo—no—” but it was too late—Kylo had kicked Hux, hard in the chest, making the other man cough and, to Rey’s horror, spit up some blood.

“You’re weak,” Hux said to him. “Unfit to lead any part of this pack. You are little more than a rabid dog. And rabid dogs don’t survive the winter.” Hux got to his feet. “Who will join me? We have food to get.”

And he swept away from the clearing, limping slightly. More than a few of the greys followed him, and what weres were there cast Kylo disapproving looks before slowly dispersing.

Kylo watched him go, shaking with anger. Then he turned on his heel and went into the woods.

Rey didn’t even have to think. She followed him.

“Ben,” she called, and he rounded on her.

“Go back,” he snapped. “Leave me alone.”

“What happened?”

“Go ba—”

“No. Stop it. What happened?”

“He drove the herd of deer we were hunting off. He said they caught wind of me but me and mine were downwind and he and his were upwind and making lots of noise.” He wasn’t looking at her. He wasn’t—

And suddenly he turned and threw his fist into a tree.

“ _Ben_!” She grabbed his arm, tugging him away. His knuckles were bleeding.

“I keep feeling small!” he howled to the stars overhead. “I feel like I’m back with my uncle, being made to feel like I’m too wild, too uncontrollable. I’m _not_ those things. But I feel like I am whenever—whenever—”

“He’s doing that on purpose,” Rey said. “He’s trying to make you feel that way.”

“Yeah and it’s working.”

“Only because you’re letting yourself react to it,” she snapped and his eyes locked onto hers. “Whatever pain you’re feeling—you have a right to feel,” she said quietly. “But only _you_ are responsible for your actions. Hate Hux. Hate that he treats you like garbage, that he tries to manipulate you. But don’t play into his hands in your own pain. You’ll make it worse.”

He stared at her for a long time, breathing heavily.

“Don’t let them hold that power over you,” she whispered, reaching a hand out to him. He took it, shaking.

“I don’t want you to think me weak,” he whispered to her. “I’m not weak. I’m not out of control. I’ve never felt stronger than I have since meeting you, even if you’re always at my throat. You came into my life and everything changed—I feel stronger, but unable to show it, unable to live it in this pack anymore. I—” He swallowed. He licked his lips. His eyes were so beautiful in the dark. “I’m so scared of losing you. I shouldn’t be. But I am. I’ll kill Hux if he kills you. I will.” Then, pleading. “Please, Rey. I want you to join me.”

His hand was hot in hers, that same feverish heat he’d told her about before he had left for the hunt. His grip tightened on her fingers—not painfully, though.

“I know,” she whispered. She thought of Finn, she thought of Poe, she thought of Leia. “I can’t.” And she watched some of that beautiful light leave his eyes.

“You think me a monster,” he said slowly, defeat dripping from every word. “You don’t—”

“I _don’t_ think you’re a monster,” she said angrily. “But I don’t like _this.”_ She waved the hand that wasn’t still in his behind her towards the pack’s encampment. “Ben,” she added quickly. “Let’s go. Let’s go now—we can run away from all this. We can leave the pack behind, leave Snoke and Hux and all of it.”

“You want to save me from _it_?” he demanded.

“You want to save _me_ from your mother. Nothing about what Snoke has built here is all right. I don’t want you here. Even if—” She can’t bring herself to say it. She did not doubt that Hux would kill her after what Ben had done. Just to hurt him. She was sure he’d do it.

She didn’t want him to have to.

She wanted him to be free.

Because he wasn’t free.

She didn’t know if he ever had been.

She wanted to save him from it, to spare him any more pain.

And she understood in that moment exactly why he was hoping so desperately that she would let him turn her into a wolf.

“Do you really think your mother is worse than Snoke?” she asked, her voice barely more than a whisper. “Are you so frightened of her?”

“I’m not afraid,” he said at once.

“You are,” she whispered and with her free hand she reached up to cup his face, to stroke along the line of the scar she’d cut there. “You are. You just said.”

“I just said I was afraid of losing _you_ ,” he said forcefully. “And I am.”

And his lips were on hers and everything stood still. There was no rustling of branches in the wind, no sound of her breath or her beating heart. There was just her, and him. There was just his lips and hers, and the way her hand left his cheek to cradle the back of his neck and the way he released her hand to rest it on her hip. It wasn’t a gentle kiss, but Rey didn’t care. Rey had never had a gentle life, and it would have felt out of place, she thought, to have something tender. She didn’t think it would fit from him, not now, not in his agitation.

He devoured her like the wolf might, his lips feasting on hers, hot and warm, his tongue delving into her mouth and twining around hers. He pushed her back until she was pressed against a tree and then he was pressing himself flush against her, his heart against her breast, his knees bending to line his groin to hers and Rey sighed because he was so warm and such heat had never felt so right.

“Please,” he begged her again between kisses.

“Please,” she begged him right back, pulling her lips from his to look into his eyes.

It was dark, but there was moonlight in his eyes. The full moon was so close and the forest was very nearly bright tonight.

 _I can’t,_ she thought to him, knowing that he would think the same thing.

He sighed, and pulled away.

Wordlessly, he led her out of the forest.

And was it just her, or did his shoulders seem to droop?

#

Hux and his weres brought back enough meat to last the pack a month and Kylo brooded.

Brooded because Hux was praised, or brooded because Rey still refused to bend, or brooded because—Rey hoped—he was coming to terms with the pack he wanted and the pack he was part of. He didn’t talk much. He barely seemed to acknowledge anything at all, even. He went to the sick, he went to Snoke and he came home and brooded.

And when he slept, he pulled Rey to his chest and how peaceful it was, falling asleep in his arms. _You’re not alone,_ his heartbeat told her.

Except that she would be. She was going to die and Kylo would live on in this pack that was tearing him apart, was making him feel less and less himself and she couldn’t rescue him from it. There wasn’t anything she could do except hold him, and let herself fall asleep in her arms and pray that—if there was an afterlife—one day he’d be happier there.

She continued fighting. She was determined not to submit to whatever it was that Hux was planning on. She was dead set on that. If she was going to die, dying fighting was the only way to go. Jakku hadn’t broken her, nothing else would. She wouldn’t cower and cry like a little girl. She’d come too far for that.

If Kylo noticed her training, he didn’t say anything. He just kept brooding.

The morning before the full moon dawned bright and Kylo held onto her longer before rising than he usually did. He wouldn’t look at her, but she understood why. _This isn’t goodbye,_ she wanted to say to him. _I don’t believe it._

It occurred to her in that moment that she didn’t fear death, she feared loss. She feared losing him far more than she feared no longer existing. She’d endured that agony before and never wished to again. Death was permanent. Life was so full of potential misery.

“Ben,” she whispered to him as the sun was getting lower in the sky.

Finally he looked at her, and his eyes were bright, but his face was determined.

 _You’ll burn them down for this,_ she knew. It didn’t provide her with as much comfort as she wanted it to.

“There’ll be a little time,” he said, “Between when the sun sets and the moon rises.”

She nodded, and reached for his hand. He took it.

The walk to the clearing before Snoke’s castle was longer than it should have been. The greys were antsy, the weres were, for the most part, in their cabins, preparing for a long night. And Snoke stood outside, watching them approach, Hux and Phasma on either side.

“Well?” he asked her when she and Kylo stopped to face him.

“No,” she said to him, as calmly and clearly as she could.

He sighed and turned to Hux. “You will do it, then.”

“Yes,” Hux said, his lips quirking into a delighted smile. But he wasn’t looking at Rey. He was looking at Ben. “I will bite her, since he won’t.”

Beside her, Ben let out a growl.

“What?”

Rey’s heart was drumming in her chest as she looked at Snoke.

“You said,” Kylo began, but Snoke cut him off.

“I said, yes. But this is what you wanted, isn’t it? Young Rey to be part of the pack? Or was it that you wanted her to be yours? Armitage will treat her well. She’ll make a fine bitch to him.”

“ _What_?” Rey repeated and he was trembling next to her, trembling, his hands balled into fists and Rey was suddenly afraid.

“I told you,” Hux smiled, “Unstable. Unfit.”

“But of course,” Snoke said. “It’s always best to keep a rabid dog on a leash.”

_Rabid dog._

Snoke had called him that before. So had Hux.

“How long have you been planning this?” Ben bellowed. “Did you poison my wolves?” and he was jerking forward but Rey grabbed his arm. Somehow, she knew, if he got close to them, she would lose him, they would kill Ben and then—and then she’d be a wolf. She couldn’t outrun the wolf. She hadn’t been able to outrun him when he’d been a wolf the first time.

“Don’t be foolish,” Hux was saying. “I couldn’t have done that. It would have risked my own life.”

“It was magic!” Ben roared. “I know it was.”

“And do I have magic?” Hux was leering at him.

Rey’s eyes landed on Snoke, and from the way Ben breathed, “No,” she knew that he was reaching the same conclusion at the same time she was.

“You would kill your own pack?” Ben’s words came out in little more than a whisper.

“Sacrifices must be made in the name of strength,” Snoke said. “In this case, to see if you were strong or weak. And the only thing I have gathered from this…exercise,” Snoke said with a wrinkled nose. “Is that you are weak. Weaker than Vader. Weaker than _Skywalker_. I told you: you have too much of your father’s heart in you, young _Solo_.”

And it was like that first night, and yet so unlike it.

“I killed—”

“And yet here you stand. You wish to prove anything otherwise to me? Then instead of letting Armitage bite her, you must kill her,” Snoke said. “That will complete your training, prove your dedication to—”

“To a pack you’d kill in order to play with his mind?” Rey shouted.

Snoke finally looked at her and how she hated him with all her heart. How she hated him.

“Such fire. It is a pity. One way or another, we all must give up that which we,” and he turned back to Kylo, “desire.”

The afterglow of the setting sun faded.

Ben began to shake again, but this time it was not trembling rage. This time, it was convulsion, the way the wolf had convulsed in that clearing the first night she’d seen him, the first night she’d thought him a monster.

“Ben,” she said to him, not letting go of his arm even as he shook. “ _Ben_.” She thought she heard Snoke laughing, or maybe it was him making the same sorts of noises that Ben was making as he trembled and choked and hair grew out of his arms his face his chest. His face was growing longer again, his eyes were growing lighter in shade and he was growing—ripping out of the clothes he was wearing.

And everything was moving at once. The giant wolf that was Ben had launched himself at the giant wolf, yellowish brown wolf that was Snoke, snapping huge heavy jaws at Snoke’s scarred head. And it became clear to Rey immediately that Snoke was the older, frailer, weaker wolf because once Kylo had pounced upon him, he could not—no matter how hard he tried—get up.

But Rey didn’t have more than a few seconds to take that into account because Hux and Phasma were rounding upon her. Phasma was nearly as big as Kylo, sleek and silver, while Hux was the smallest of the four wolves, red-brown and hungry. He lunged for Rey, swiping at her with a paw and Rey dodged him and grabbed the outstretched paw and twisted it as hard as she could. She didn’t have long, though. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see the pack approaching—greys and more huge weres who were watching what was happening intently. Hux snapped at her and she dropped his foot. She didn’t have time to think about just how many other wolves now surrounded her. If she let herself be distracted, Hux would kill her.

She hurried backwards—except her foot landed wrong on the uneven ground and she stumbled back into the circling Phasma, who pushed her back towards Hux. She ducked and rolled underneath the huge wolf and out of the corner of her eye she saw Kylo’s jaws close over Snoke’s throat and rip.

“Ben!” she shouted even as she heard one of the wolves in the clearing give out a surprised bark. _I don’t have a weapon—I don’t. If I did—_

If she did, she would still be facing two wolves that were larger than bears, and even if Phasma seemed content to leave her to Hux that still didn’t leave her with a whole lot of options. She’d still be surrounded by how many more, because even if for some unfathomable reason they weren’t joining the fight, she doubted very much they would let her go in peace. It was a matter of surviving, not a matter of winning.

And then there was a blur of black fur and Rey was knocked out of the way as Kylo went for Hux.

And that was when Phasma decided to get involved. She pushed past Rey as well and soon all Rey could hear was a clattering of teeth, a snapping of jaws, and angry barks of wolves at war.

 _No_ , she thought desperately. _No, no, no._ He may be the strongest, and the largest, but there was one of him and two of them and she was useless without jaws and claws of her own. She looked around, desperately. The wolves were watching intently, a few of them with hackles raised and teeth bared and she understood. They were waiting to see which was the strongest, which would come out of the fight their new leader, now that Snoke was dead.

“Etta!” she shouted at them. “Emry!” But she didn’t know which ones they were. Why weren’t they helping? Didn’t they care? Did no one care for him but Rey?

 _Are you all right?_ she’d asked him.

There were tears on her face as she heard him let out a loud, high-pitched yip of pain.

And suddenly it occurred to her, and she felt so _stupid_ that it hadn’t occurred to her before. But she shouldn’t be surprised.

She hadn’t had a teacher.

She’d taught herself how to fight, but she hadn’t had the time or the energy to begin trying to teach herself—

She closed her eyes, and reached down into that icy cold control and Hux _froze_ he just froze, completely immobile, the way that Ben had immobilized her when he’d tied her up and brought her here in the first place.

With a great swipe of his paw, Ben sent Hux flying and then rounded on Phasma who, it turned out, was too much of a coward to face him and backed down at once. Kylo lumbered through the clearing, huge and heavy, stopping before Rey.

She had never learned how to communicate with wolves. She wished she had, wished she had made him teach her. Maybe then she would have understood the expression on his face, the motions of his ears.

But she saw his eyes and that was enough.

She hurried towards him and he lowered himself slightly so that it would be easier for her to clamber onto his back.

And then he was running, through the encampment, out into the night, as fast as his legs would carry him.


	5. Chapter 5

She buried her face in his fur as he ran. The wind was cold against her face and he was so warm and his fur was so very soft, soft like his hair.

His paws landed heavily as he ran through the woods, and but they landed in time with Rey’s pumping heart so it took her a long while to notice. _I am here. He is here. We are both alive._ _We saved one another._

She did not doubt that Hux would be on Ben’s tail before long, a thought that he seemed to have considered because the first moment that they reached a stream he splashed into it and slowed down to pick his way down the way across stones and water for at least a mile before coming out on the other side.

“Ben,” she said to him as he moved slowly, stroking a spot behind his ears. “ _Ben_.” She didn’t know what else to say. All she could think to say was his name, over and over again. Ben who had fought for her, who had fought for himself, who had freed himself—and how incredibly he had done so.

When she had first come north, she had been surprised at how long winter nights could be. Tonight, she was grateful for it, because it meant that she and Ben could make their way further and further away from the pack, through the great wood towards something. She didn’t know where they were going. She didn’t quite care. Not now. Maybe in the morning, when he was a man again.

After several hours he stopped, clearly growing tired. She slid from his back and he sat down on his haunches, his tongue hanging out of his mouth as he panted and she stepped into his chest and wrapped her arms around the wolf. She kissed the spot where she thought his heart was and he nuzzled at her. He was so very warm, and the night was so very cold. And the heavens were on their side because it was starting to rain freezing rain.

She didn’t say anything. She didn’t want to say anything until he could respond. It wouldn’t be so long now, she was sure.

And she was right. He was shaking again, and groaning as his paws shrunk into hands, as his hair retracted into his skin as his bones and muscles reshaped and reformed themselves and he crumpled to the ground, completely naked again.

Rey dropped to the ground next to him and wrapped her arms around him, pulling him tight to her. “You’re all right,” she whispered. She could see great scabbed cuts that looked as though the blood hadn’t fully congealed. There were bruises and indentations from where teeth or paws had not broken the skin. “Ben.”

“Rey.” And his arms were around her and he was shaking again—from tired, she rather thought. He had run through the night, and been up the whole day before. “God, Rey—I was—”

But whatever he was, he did not say because his lips were at her throat, sucking at it, making their way up, up, up to her jaw, to her lips again, and her hands were running through his soft dark hair and the sun was peeking through the trees. He pushed her down onto the ground, and hovered over her and it was like being in the woods a few days before when he kissed her, when his warmth crossed from his heart to hers—only better. So much better.

Part of her expected him to tug at her trousers, to pull them down her legs and push inside her, hot and hard in the icy rain. She would have welcomed it after what had happened. But he didn’t. Instead, he let himself collapse on top of her and held her close. “You need to rest,” she said, breathing carefully. He was heavy, and pressed down on her stomach but she loved the weight of him, alive and there with her.

“We need to keep going,” he said. “The pack—”

“Will find us pretty quickly if you can’t keep up,” she said.

“Will be resting now. We can make better progress—especially with the rain to wash away our scent.”

“Ben.”

“Rey.”

She reached a hand up and touched the dark circles under his eyes and he sighed. “Fine,” he said. “Just for a little while.” She nodded. Then she pushed him off her. For a fleeting second, he looked distressed until he realized she was tugging off her cloak and wrapping it around him.

“I run warm,” he said.

“Do you have clothes nearby? Or do you intend to make your way back to civilization completely naked?”

He flushed. And suddenly she was giggling, because she could imagine him doing just that, just to prove he could, just because she’d suggested he couldn’t. He grinned too and kissed her lightly and pulled her back down to lie there next to him, covering her with as much of the cloak as he could. It was not long, before she was asleep in his arms once again.

#

They moved quickly through the day. Rey was glad of that. It was cold without her cloak, and for all Kylo protested that he didn’t need it, she could tell that he did. At least she had a few layers to protect her. He had nothing.

They walked and walked and walked. It was not as quick as Rey would have wanted because Ben’s feet were bare. But that wasn’t to be helped, unless they stumbled upon an abandoned pair of boots somewhere in the woods.

“Are you all right?” he kept asking her.

“I’m fine,” she kept replying, rolling her eyes. “Are _you_ all right?”

He paused at the question, thinking for a long while as they walked. “No,” he said. “But I will be.” There was anger in his voice, but also determination.

“I meant about your wounds,” she said quietly and he looked down as though noticing them for the first time. They were already looking far more healed than they had any right to.

“I heal quickly,” he said. “They’ll scar, but if they haven’t killed me yet, they won’t.”

He reached for her hand and she took it.

It came out in bits and pieces, the frustration of his heart. “I killed my father for him,” he said as they cooked a rabbit that Rey had managed to kill with a rock. “He said that that was all I’d ever need to do to prove my loyalty to him. It broke my heart right in two, broke my spirit, broke—me.” Oddly, he didn’t sound defeated, though. “It felt good, killing him. It felt right.” And Rey knew he meant Snoke, not his father.

Somewhere during the day, the freezing rain turned into light puffs of snow and Rey let out a laugh of delight at the sight of it. She’d heard of snow before, but she’d never seen it. She stuck out her tongue to catch it, and grinned until her eyes landed on Ben’s feet. “Is it going to be—” she asked and he cut her off.

“It’ll be fine. I’ve been in snow in worse conditions before. I promise.”

“Poe said people’s toes could freeze off,” she said nervously. She didn’t want that to happen to him because he was too stubborn.

“None of them were werewolves. You have my word—I’m warm enough.”

It would have to be enough for now, but Rey hoped they came across a village soon because she did still worry.

“He wanted me not to have you. That was it. That was all he cared about. He didn’t care that I felt stronger—if I was stronger than he couldn’t control me, so he wanted me weakened. He wanted me to think I was weaker rather than stronger.”

“What do you mean, stronger?” Rey asked quietly and he looked at her sharply.

“Things were out of my control,” he said. “But I felt more able to recognize what I wanted. How I wanted to be. When things were in my control, before you, it never felt that way. It felt—it felt like they were in control because I was controlled. But the second I wasn’t controllable anymore, suddenly I felt—” he went quiet for a long while before saying, “I felt as though I could be someone without anyone telling me how to be. Well—anyone except you, I suppose. But you were telling me to be myself and to look to myself for answers, not to others.” He gave her an almost shy, wondering look. He reached for her hand again and brought it to his lips.

Their pace was quick enough that her blood was flowing as hot as it could through her, but that didn’t stop her from noticing how cold her fingers were. She balled her hands into fists, trying to warm them with her palms. _Cold is a state of mind,_ she told herself. It had worked in Jakku on the hottest days, reminding herself that heat was a state of mind, that if she allowed herself to feel hot—even if it was blisteringly so—she would be admitting defeat and she refused to be defeated.

“I hate leaving them to him,” he said. “I feel like I’m abandoning them. Emry and Etta will resist him, but I hate that Hux got the pack, even if it means I get you.” He pulled her in for another kiss and he was so warm. She loved that he’d always be warm. She shivered.

“Are you cold?”

“I’m fine.”

“It’s your cloak.”

“Actually it’s your cloak.”

“I gave it to you.”

“You’ve given me so much.”

“And not enough.” He kissed her again.

“Why does the magic feel cold?” Rey asked him when they had paused to eat more of the rabbit. “When I reach for it, it’s cold.”

He frowned. “Mine’s always been hot,” he said. “So I don’t know.”

“Maz might.”

His frown deepened and he looked at her, suddenly worried. “She might.”

“What’s wrong?” But she knew the answer. “Just because you left the pack doesn’t mean you want to go back.”

He watched her warily. But there were many things that Rey could be patient about, especially now that she wasn’t waiting to die. She could wait for this too.

They kept walking after the sun had set, as the freshly waning moon began to shine and illuminate the woods around them. They did not light a fire, and Ben took first watch, dropping Rey’s cloak over her to keep her warm.

“You’ll get cold,” she told him, her teeth chattering.

“Your lips are turning blue,” he replied, kissing them. He held her close for a moment, and god, he was so very warm.

It was hard falling asleep in the cold. It was all-consuming, she couldn’t think of anything but how cold she was, how she wished the cloak would hurry up and help her get warm with its traces of Ben. She was shivering, shivering, shivering.

Until she wasn’t anymore.

#

“Rey,” he was shaking her awake, panic in his voice. “Rey, please. Rey”

“What’s wrong?” she croaked out. Why was everything out of focus? Why were her words slurring?

“Oh thank god,” he clutched her to his chest. He was so warm. So warm.

“Ben?” She sounded like she was so far away. Her voice sounded so small. It didn’t sound like her own voice. What was happening?. And she was in his arms and he was running and it didn’t matter that he didn’t have shoes on, it didn’t matter at all, he was running as fast as if he were the wolf again and Rey was shivering and shuddering in his arms.

#

He wouldn’t let her sleep.

She would try to sleep in his arms and he would pinch her, poke her prod her, would pause in his running until she was fully awake.

It was so cold.

He was so warm.

She just wanted to be warm again.

#

“There’s got to be a good story here.”

She recognized that voice. From where, though?

“Please. You have to help.” Ben was growling. Ben was begging.

“Come in,” the voice said again.

“She’s cold,” he said. “She insisted I take her cloak, but she’s cold and her heart is failing and—”

“Quiet. Put her down by the fire.”

He did.

The fire was warm but far away and Rey turned her head towards it. Then there were hands pressing along her neck, under the collar of her shirt, over her heart. They weren’t Ben’s hands. They were too small to be Ben’s hands.

“You have to save her. I know you can. You can’t leave her to die.”

And the hands were gone and Rey was fading.

She tried not to, she tried to force her brain to stay awake, to stay _focused_ but she was so cold and it was hard to find the magic inside her when the rest of her was freezing too.

“Ben,” she pleaded. He was warm. She knew if he just touched her, it would stop being like this.

“Come on,” said the other voice. “Pick her up. We’ll take her upstairs.”

And there it was, the sweet relief she had known awaited her in his arms.

And then he was gone again and Rey whined.

The other hands were back, tugging her clothes off her as she spoke briskly. “We have two options,” said the woman. Why was she so familiar? If only Rey could summon the strength to open her eyes. “The first is that I waste hours and an unseemly amount of energy re-heating every inch of her body.”

“And the second?” Ben growled.

“The second is you hold her and cover her with as much of your warmth as you can until she’s warmed up again. That one’s my preference since I was about to go to bed when you got here and you look dead on your feet. And you are, conveniently, already naked.”

There was silence for a moment.

“This will work?”

“Yes,” she said. “And will be less draining for everyone involved. And you won’t have to constantly be worrying after me about how she’s doing. You’ll know yourself. I’ll get some hot bricks for the bed. Go on.  Get her out of those freezing clothes.”

He did, and she heard the sound of them hitting hardwood floor from where she was lying too cold to shiver on the bed.  And he was next to her, holding her close in his arms, turning her onto her side so that she could press her face into his collarbone. He pressed his lips into her hair, and she thought she heard him whisper something but she didn’t know what it was. Then his fingers plucked at the ring dangling from its chain around her neck. He held it for just a moment before letting it drop again and she sighed as he wrapped his arms around her squeezing her tight.

He was so warm.

She felt safe.

And she let herself fade into it.

#

There was something familiar in this warmth.

Jakku had been hot, and dry, and brutal.

This was gentle, soft, humid, human.

Rey rubbed her face against his skin. He smelled like sweat and fear and his arms were holding her so tightly. But something about him relaxed against her as she rubbed her face back and forth. “Rey,” he whispered and his lips were in her hair. She kissed his chest, then tilted her head up to him.

“What happened?” she asked him.

“You got cold.” There was no need for him to whisper, to murmur, to keep his voice low, but he did. “You almost froze to death.”

Rey blinked. “Oh,” she said. “Oh. I suppose that makes sense.”

He rolled his eyes and kissed her again and pulled her to him more tightly.

“I’m better now, though, right?” she asked quietly.

He closed his eyes and she felt a slight warm pressure crossing her skin, filling her heart, tracing its way through her gut.

“Yes,” he said at last. “I think so. Maz said it would be a few hours.”

“Maz,” Rey sighed. “I thought she sounded familiar.”

“The one thing I can’t save you from is your own body failing you,” he grumbled. “I told you I couldn’t heal.” He kissed her forehead. “Maz was the only way I could think to save you. But given her solution, it was silly to run through the snow like that.”

Rey bit back a giggle and kissed his chest again, imagining him running naked through the swirling snow, but the urge to laugh faded as she imagined her bundled in his arms, possibly dying, and the fear on his face as he went to find what he thought was his only hope of saving her.

How much had he risked to keep her alive, to keep her safe, from the moment he’d met her.

It was more than anyone had ever done for her before. Even Finn had not come after her after she’d been kidnapped, though she couldn’t blame him for that. Ben, though… and suddenly she felt like crying.

“I love you,” she whispered to him, blinking furiously to keep her tears at bay. “I do—I think I do—I—”

But he cut her off with a kiss and this was not a quick one. This was more deeply than he’d kissed her in the forest that first time, or after he had transformed the second. This was not just him devouring her, this was something else entirely. His lips moved slowly against hers, though it didn’t feel like a lazy kiss at all. On the contrary, she had the impression from the way he was breathing, from the way his hands were moving along her back that this was a kiss he was memorizing—the texture and shape of her, the taste of her, the warmth of her. He was delighting in her love right now and she shifted in his arms, pulling her own loose so that she could wrap them around his neck and pull him closer to her so that her breasts flattened against his chest and she could feel his heart pounding in his ribcage.

That was when he broke the kiss and pulled away from her slightly. A hand left her back and came—not to her breast as she’d expected to when it crossed towards her front, but to the chain with the large bronze braided ring.

“Where did you get this?” he asked her almost breathlessly.

“Maz gave it to me,” she said. “Before I left Raddus. She said—” Rey paued, trying to remember. “She said no one is coming back for you. But there is someone who still can. She said when the time came, I’d know what to do.”

Ben’s eyes were unfathomable as he stared at her, so dark, but always with that shadow of wolfish gold.

“Why?” she asked.

“It was mine,” he said. “The ring of my house. I threw it in the dirt when I left.”

“Then it’s yours,” Rey said and she reached behind her neck to unclasp the chain—a harder feat than it would have been ordinarily, given how he was holding her.

“Keep it,” he told her.

“It’s yours.”

“ _Keep it_ ,” he repeated firmly. “It’s yours.”

“Ben—”

“It’s yours because I’m yours. It’s yours, like my heart. Keep it.”

She was holding the ring in her hand. It was too big for any of her fingers—even her thumb—but she could tell it would fit Ben perfectly. With a roll of his eyes he took it from her and for a moment she thought she’d won. But then she felt the heat of his magic rolling around the ring and before her eyes it shrunk down and he slid it on one of her fingers.

“Like my heart,” he said to her again, and Rey pulled his lips to his again and several things hit her all at once.

The first was that she knew because she had seen it when Finn and Rose had agreed to marriage—an exchange of rings was customary.

The second was that she loved him, and if he had given her his heart, it was because he in turn had hers.

And the last was that they were lying naked together in the most comfortable bed that Rey had ever been in in her life, alive, warm, and together.

So very together.

She kissed him and kissed him and kissed him until she forgot what it felt like not to be kissing him, until she forgot that her lips had lived without his for so long, until she forgot that she could pause in kissing him and come back to it later. Later was a nebulous concept, and one that Rey had always waited for patiently.

She could not think of when she had ever been able to have what she wanted _now_.

There was no waiting for Ben as he rolled her onto her back—unless it was the waiting for his lips to return to hers because he had taken them away to kiss her neck, to mouth at her breasts, to lick his way down her legs before covering her with his body once again and sliding his tongue into his mouth as though that, too, were hers now.

She ran her fingers over his cuts and bruises from his fight with Snoke and Hux and Phasma, and felt him stiffen.

“Do they hurt?” she asked him.

“Not as much as losing you would have.” She laughed and kissed him and repeated her question. “A little,” he admitted. “But they will heal quickly. It’s not the first time I’ve fought them, nor the first time I’ve beaten them, and I would have ripped his throat out if he’d tried to bite you.”

That made Rey pause and frown. “When Snoke said that I’d make a bitch to him—is there something claiming in that bite?” She hadn’t thought much of it, but Etta had said that she’d be _his_ if he bit her.  She had assumed it was that she would be his because she would have chosen that, chosen him, but now she was not so sure.

Ben went very still, and it was because their chests were pressed so close together that she could feel the way his heart rate picked up. “There can be,” he said at last. “It depends on the wolf, and the bite. I—” he took a deep breath. “I wouldn’t have bitten you that way. I wanted you to want me—it doesn’t count if you don’t have a choice but to run at my side.” His gaze was suddenly desperate, needing her to believe him, needing her to trust him.

“Did Snoke bite you like that?” she asked him quietly, knowing the answer, knowing how he had wriggled and writhed in his mind, unable to confront the truth of Snoke when she’d tried to make him.

He squeezed his eyes shut and lowered his forehead to hers. Then he nodded. “I wanted him to,” he said, “I wanted—”

“You’re free now,” she cut him off with a whisper, not wanting to hear more. It was the past, and it was a past she would happily prefer to let die. “You are. You freed yourself.” She ran her fingers along his face, tracing little circles until he opened his eyes again.

And when he did her breath caught in her throat, her stomach writhed and she became even more aware of how naked she was, how on top of her he was, how strong and large he was, how hard he was, how in love with her he was.

“I wanted you to want me,” he said to her so quietly and she loved just looking at his lips. They were so full and so red and she knew the feel and taste of them. “I wanted you to want _me_ and not it. Because I had always been wanted for _it_ not me. I—I didn’t want to do that to you.”

“You never wanted to be him,” she said. “You wanted someone to care about you.” Since he felt his parents never had, since Snoke certainly hadn’t. Of course he had latched onto her when she’d asked if he was all right. Of course he had cared about her for that moment. And in caring about her, he began to care about himself again. “And I do.” There were tears in her eyes, and Ben was kissing her cheeks clear of them. “Ben, I love you.”

And there they were again—his perfect lips, hungry again. He shifted on his knees ever so slightly and she could feel is cock between their bellies, hot and thick and heavy. They were staring into one another’s eyes, aware they were on a precipice, both waiting for the other to move.

Rey shifted her hips slightly, tilting them up—aware only when her slit grazed the base of his cock of how damp she was.

It was enough.

His lips crashed against hers, her fingers fisted in his hair and he began rocking his hips against her with an almost feverish need. The heat of him was overwhelming as he moved, as his heart sent blood pulsing through him and sent his temperature higher than hers and it was the perfect heat, the human heat, the home heat that was so unlike Jakku.

Ben was nothing like Jakku. He wanted her, he protected her, he saved her life. He loved her. He loved her so much she could see it in his eyes, feel it in his lips, in his hands when they caressed her face, in his heart when he’d told her to keep his ring.

Everything about him, about this, felt right now. Everything about the way he was kissing her, the way he was touching her, the way she was holding him, and sucking at his skin, and rocking her hips along the length of his cock—everything felt right. When he slipped his hand between them and began to rub practiced fingers along her slit, she hummed with delight, and when he slid two fingers inside her, pumping them in and out, she felt like she could melt happily into the bed and just let him touch her forever. She could already feel forever in his touch. Could he feel forever in hers?

She reached her own hand down between them and took him in her hand. He was thick as her spear, and just as sturdy, but his skin was the softest skin she’d ever touched and he froze under her fingers, his breathing growing more erratic, his eyes fluttering closed for just a moment.

“Rey,” he murmured and he moved slightly, his cock sliding through her hand. The tip of it had the softest skin of all and he made a little growling noise as she ran her thumb over it, feeling a bit of dampness there.

Then he was gone from her hand and he had added another finger to her cunt. He pumped it once, twice, three times as she gasped and then his hand was gone and he was pressing into her, slowly, but determined to go as deep as he could and Rey clutched at him because he was wider than his fingers had been but it wasn’t painful—it felt the way a good stretch did, like your muscles needed it, like they would be more relaxed and at ease for it.

“Did you just bite me?” he asked, pausing.

Rey’s teeth were on his shoulder—not enough to break his skin, but very obviously biting him. She hadn’t even realized she was doing it. He laughed lightly as she released his shoulder and tilted her head up for his lips again. “Nice to know I have better self control than you.”

“Oh shut up,” she replied and wrapped her legs around his hips, pulling him in deeper and grabbing hold of his rear as he began to pump in a little more slowly and his laughter stopped.

Stopped because it had been replaced with a different noise, a sigh that came from deep in his chest as he pushed into her and pulled back out, as he filled her and voided her and she held on, massaging the muscles of his ass.

He tried to kiss her again, but the more he moved, the harder it was for his lips to reach hers because his torso was so much longer than hers. She kissed his neck, his chest, she reached further down to cup his balls—which elicited a positive growl as she rolled each one between her fingers—she nipped at his skin, and kissed the places where Hux and Phasma had hurt him while he’d fought to protect her.

_He protected me—and I protected him._

Maybe it was instinct, or maybe it was whim—she wasn’t wholly sure—but she rolled him onto his back and sat up, feeling the way he stretched her even more while she straddled his hips. His head fell back against the pillows and he paused in his movements, just to look at her. His hands traced the lines of her ribs and stroked at her breasts before crossing down to her back and sitting up underneath her. With her on his lap like this, it was so easy to kiss him now. They were at just the right height.

She toyed with the hair at the nape of his neck as she undulated over him and now it was his turn to bite at her collarbone, to suck at her neck, to pant into her skin as they felt so alive in their togetherness.

His fingers brushed at the base of her, right above where he was inside her and she trembled. She knew that knot better than she would admit—lonely nights in Jakku made to feel less lonely—but to have him touch her there was something else. “Ben,” she moaned into his lips. “Ben, please, Ben, I—” and then she lost herself to the swell of it, the heat of his fingers and the heat of her heart combining between her legs until she was panting and gasping and languidly unable to move anymore while her cunt clasped at him.

He didn’t seem to mind though. He was smiling and kissing her and rolling her back onto her back and Rey brushed her lips over whatever part of his skin she could reach. “I love you,” she whispered to him, because she hadn’t been able to say it while he’d been pushing her into incoherent pleasure, “I love you, Ben. I love you.”

And she felt heat—his heat—a wet heat filling her as he collapsed forward onto her, the full weight of him pressing her into the soft mattress. She wrapped her legs around him, wrapped her arms around him, held him while his breath grew more regular.

“I love you,” he whispered to her after a while. He pulled himself loose from her and rolled off her, pulling her to his chest. “I love you.” He didn’t have to say it. She already knew it. But she was still glad he did.

#

They fucked two more times in the next few hours between bouts of lying there quietly in one another’s arms, and it was only when Rey’s stomach growled that Ben got out of the bed, kissing her, and making for the door before stopping short and turning to look around the room.

“What’s wrong?” Rey asked him, trying not to ogle him too obviously. He was so beautiful, the way his muscles rippled like that.

“I don’t have clothes,” he said. “If we were home,” he paused and Rey knew that his heart was swelling the way hers was, thinking of a home they had both longed for, of a place they shared together, “If we were home, I wouldn’t care, but…”

His eyes landed on the cloak he had worn while they’d been out in the woods and he wrapped it around himself, opening the door and making a noise of surprise. “She left clothes for me.” The shirt and pants were a little too small, but Rey couldn’t complain because it just made his muscles seem to bulge that much more. She hid her pleased smile in a pillow as he ducked out of the room.

He was gone a long while. So long that Rey almost got out of the bed to look for him. She got so far as to put her foot on the ground before shuddering. Despite the fire in the fireplace—how had it been going so strong for so long?—but of course. Magic—the floor was freezing cold.

_He’ll be back for me._

She knew it. She trusted it. She trusted it far more than she’d ever trusted anything.

And he was, with a large tray of food and little Maz Kanata with her bottlecap glasses following him.

Maz clambered up on the bed and pressed her hand to Rey’s heart, looking deep in her eyes as she did so. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, that’s better.”

“Thank you,” Rey said at once. “Thank you so much for—”

“Nonsense. It was a bed and I had it.” She glanced between the two of them for a moment. “Eat. Rest. You have a road waiting for you.”

“We do?” Rey asked.

“You came further west than you needed to, and there’s a storm brewing you’ll likely need to travel to quickly if you want to get back to Raddus before it lands.”

Rey’s eyes snapped to Ben. He didn’t move. He didn’t say anything.

Maz shook her head. “At least you come by your stubbornness honestly.” She gave him a pat on the shoulder. “And I’ll make sure you’re properly fitted for the cold.” Then she left.

“Back to Raddus?” Rey asked quietly, reaching for a bun from the tray. It was still warm, and full of a spiced meat.

“Hux will attack,” Ben said quietly. “He’ll think it’ll be a way to get back at me and to show his own power. And he’ll be right.” He swallowed. “I’m not going to run from it. And if it’s not what I want it to be, I don’t have to stay. But I’m not running from anything. And I won’t be the reason you don’t ever see your friends again.”

She could kiss him, except she was eating.

He understood, though, and it wasn’t long before he, too, was eating.

#

They set out into the snow together the next day, wrapped in furs and wearing heavy boots. Rey wasn’t cold at all—except when the wind blew into her face. She was almost too warm, and she wondered if Maz hadn’t put a spell on the cloak. When she asked Ben about it, his lips twitched towards a smile.

“She didn’t,” he said. “But I did.” Rey rolled her eyes at him, and he added, seriously, “You nearly died and it was my fault. I won’t run that risk again.  I should have done it the first time.  How I didn't think to...”

“There was a lot going on,” Rey said.

“True, but—”

“And you’ll teach me how soon enough and then I’ll be able to do it for myself.”

He smiled at her, and she grinned up at him.

It was slow-going through the snow, and muscles Rey had thought she’d lost when she’d left the sands grew weary more quickly than she’d like. But when she grew tired, they slowed, and Ben would take her hand and help her along until she wasn’t tired anymore.

For three days, they walked. For three nights, they curled together by fires, hands exploring under layers of clothing and fur as they sighed into one another’s mouths. Rey did not let herself think about what might be happening in the pack right now. She did not let herself think about what awaited them in Raddus, those who might not welcome Ben back with open arms as she hoped they would. It was easy to put such thoughts aside, with him in her arms.

On the fourth day, Rey recognized where they were and when she looked at Ben, she could see that he did too. His face was wooden, his eyes were wide and he seemed to be taking deep breaths. She reached for his hand.

“It will be all right,” she whispered, and he glanced at her, and nodded.

No one took note of them as they made their way into the city. They moved slowly through the streets, not because they were tired but because Ben kept pausing to take in what he saw, to stare at shops or houses or halls. Rey would take his hand when he paused, and squeeze it until he was ready to move again.

Rey expected him to stop for a very long time at the gates to his mother’s castle, but he didn’t. He walked right through them, shoulders squared and head tall and it wasn’t until he was halfway across the courtyard that Rey heard someone shouting, “Hey! You! Stop in the name of Lady Organa!”

He did stop, and he turned his head—but it wasn’t until the guard was bustling towards them that Rey realized who it was.

“Finn!” she squealed in delight and pelted towards him, throwing her arms around his neck and kissing his cheek.

“Rey?” And then, his voice much thicker, “Rey!” and his arms tightened around her. “We thought you were dead when we couldn’t find you in the woods! Poe said we needed to return and I—I—”

She could hear him trying to apologize and she said, “It’s all right—I’m all right,” at the same time that he said, “I was gathering men to try and rescue you. I didn’t believe you were dead—I refused to believe it. I would have gone by myself, but Lady Organa said we should wait for this next moon to pass and I needed to wait for my hand to recover from that monster.”

“And it did,” she said. She pulled herself from his embrace, smiling. Then she laughed. “Finn, it’s so good to see you! I’ve missed you.”

“Have you been all right?” Finn asks, taking in her face. “What happened?” Rey turned and looked over her shoulder.

Ben was staring at them, his eyes hard as he looked at Finn. For a moment, Rey was worried at the way his eyes were blazing, that she’d gone and thrown her arms around her friend just like that. _I never pretended not to love him, even if it’s not the way I love you,_ she thought, more than a little annoyed.

“I’m sorry about your hand,” Ben said at last, nodding to it. His voice was stiff, his face wooden but he took a step closer, his gaze never leaving Finn’s face.

Finn looked down at his hand, then back up at Ben, frowning slightly. When he looked up again at Ben, his frown deepened.

“What’s your purpose here?” he asked, squaring his shoulder. His hand drifted to the hilt of the sword at his belt.

“To see my mother,” Ben replied evenly.

Whatever response Finn had been expecting, it wasn’t that.

“Ben Solo?” he said slowly. “You’re Ben Solo?”

But even as Ben nodded, Finn looked back down at his hand. When he looked up, there was unbridled rage in his eyes.

“Finn,” Rey said slowly, stepping forward. She couldn’t blame him for his anger, but she wanted him to understand—and quickly. Finn raised his eyebrows at her and almost immediately, the anger seemed to drain away.

He sighed and looked back at Ben. “If she has misplaced her trust in you, I will make you pay for my hand, got that?” he snapped at Ben.

Ben inclined his head.

“Stay here,” Finn said and he moved past them, undoubtedly to go into the castle and determine what to do with Lady Organa’s returned son.

Rey watched him go before turning to Ben. His eyes were also on Finn’s back, but, as though he sensed her gaze, he looked down at her.

“He loves you dearly,” he said, almost hesitatingly.

“And I him. He’s my dearest friend,” Rey said, taking Ben’s hand and squeezing it.

He smiled slightly and squeezed her hand again.

That was how Leia Organa found them when she came hurrying out of the keep moments later, stopping short when she saw her son standing there.

“Ben.” Her voice caught in her throat, as though she couldn’t truly believe it, couldn’t trust her own eyes.

He turned his gaze to her, his hand still in Rey’s. “Mother. Wolves will be at your throat soon. And I—” but Lady Organa did not let him finish. She threw her arms around him, standing on the very tips of her toes to hold him better and Ben released Rey’s hand in order to hug his mother.

“I never thought I’d see you again,” Lady Organa said. “Wolves can wait.” And without another word, she was leading Ben and Rey into the warmth of the castle.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope you enjoyed this fic! I wanted to leave the "politics/war" plotline a little open ended for a few reasons:
> 
> 1) it's a Reylo fic and the Reylo had wrapped up  
> 2) I don't think that any story really can perfectly wrap up a politics/war plotline (even the OT didn't tbh)  
> 3) There was a deadline to finishing and I wasn't sure how to do it.
> 
> If I ever figure out how to do it, there might be a sequel but I make _no_ promises on that front because I cannot express just how much the "I wasn't sure how to do it" was the deciding factor in the above.
> 
> \o/

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is part of the RFFA's [After The Blazing Fire Dies](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/RFFA_After_the_Blazing_Fire_Dies) 2019 fic exchange. I encourage you to check out the wonderful other fics written for the exchange.
> 
> You can find me on[Twitter](https://twitter.com/crossing_winter) and [Pillowfort](https://www.pillowfort.io/crossingwinter)


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